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This chapter reviews the key findings and innovation leadership insights from this book, as well as pointing out directions for future research. We find a series of learning insights for people engaged in innovation leadership, at the distinct levels of self-leadership, team leadership, organisational leadership, and ecosystem leadership. We also find commonalities across these levels, as well as differences that reflect the complexity of these different leadership arenas. Leadership practice that orchestrates contributions from diverse viewpoints, seeing itself as with the group, rather than above it, is most likely to help turn ideas into value in repeatable ways. We also find evidence that mindset, skills, and behaviours are all important in the make-up of competencies. We point to the requirement for further research at all four levels, to bring further insights in what is still an emerging field; as well as a need for more research into competency development for innovation leadership; and we advocate a research approach that emphasises relational leadership, acknowledging that most leadership practice is shared across people.

This chapter first describes the essential aspects of a currently changing world, which is characterised by digitalisation, globalisation and politically unstable situations. Based on this transformation context, key concepts such as leadership, innovation, innovation leadership and leadership competences are introduced, along with a new definition and framework for innovation leadership. The chapter discusses the distinction between innovation leadership and innovation management, and the connecting lines between these two concepts. The innovation leadership framework is described and related to the individual contributions of the authors in the book. The chapter frames these contributions along the dimensions of self-leadership, team leadership, organisational leadership and ecosystem leadership.

Achieving continuous innovation performance still poses a major challenge to established companies as it requires high flexibility and adaptability in usually efficiently structured organisations. One way to tackle this challenge lies in establishing effective behaviours to successfully establish and apply innovation leadership mechanisms in an organisation. The emerging agile leadership style could provide such effective behaviours, as it addresses the demand for flexibility and adaptability on the organisational level. Despite these clear parallels research on the link between agile leadership and innovation leadership, and their possible combined contribution to drive continuous innovation performance is still in its infancy. Accordingly, the present study examines the behaviours of agile leaders to promote continuous innovation in established companies. It applies a discovery-driven research process of agile leaders to derive and categorise their behaviours. The subsequent comparison of the identified agile leadership behaviours with innovation leadership mechanisms from existing literature leads to eight specific, combined agile leadership principles within the three categories empowerment, performance enhancement, and support for continuous innovation. Eventually, this basis allows the conceptualisation of a first exploratory framework with the identified behaviours as possible enablers, and innovation leadership mechanisms as possible mediators for the continuous innovation performance, subject to test. These findings enhance existing theory by clarifying a possible link between agile leadership and continuous innovation. That way, practitioners can profit from concrete principles for agile leaders to inspire and enable continuous innovation in individuals and teams.

For decades, the construction industry has not significantly changed the way it operates, despite its economic and ecological importance worldwide. Hilti’s ambition is to change that and create a better future for its customers. This chapter highlights which trade-offs Hilti faces in their innovation journey towards solutions, while transforming the organisation: speed versus involvement, agility versus perfection and relationship versus competencies. Visible leadership and the preservation of the unique Hilti culture has been critical to deal with those dualities. To create tangible results, it has proven essential to evolve structures and processes for the ‘new solution’ businesses, while changing the way of hiring people and the types of people required for those new units. Innovating the ‘Hilti way’ summarises key learnings for other organisations.

This chapter illustrates the concept of organisational innovation leadership (OIL) through a case study of the organisational transformation of Eddyfi Technologies to achieve superior innovative capacity through synergetic centralisation. The case study focusses on the real challenges faced when effecting organisational transformation, and how innovation leadership practices provided constructive resolutions that culminated in a successful reorganisation. We find that effective innovation leadership is conveyed primarily through establishing close relationships, open communication, and setting the example in a consistent and strict manner.