IIC Partners: Inside Innovation with the Tweddle Group’s Chief Innovation Officer

IIC Partners interviewed Ty Beltramo, Chief Innovation Officer of Tweddle Group.

Ty talks about his experience on managing creative teams, aligning emerging trends with business strategy and product development and keeping a leading innovative edge against the competition.

What does a Chief Innovation Officer do?
The CIO is all about culture and progress. That means crafting a culture that generates creativity, energy, and fearlessness. It has to be safe to fail fast, and unsafe to fail slowly. Experimentation, learning, and wild thinking are fostered when people believe they are safe to try things and challenge current thinking. Creative energy must be channeled in a strategic direction and progress must be measured. The CIO has to create the explicit bridge between the daily activities of the team and the innovations that matter to the company.

What are the biggest challenges you face as Chief Innovation Officer?
Scope. Innovation is a momentum game. To build and maintain momentum, you must ensure there is no friction in your teams, processes, or technologies. If you fail in any one of the three main pieces of your engine (teams, processes and technologies), innovation will be hampered.

Presence. It’s easy for poor time management and confused priorities to drag the CIO away from his or her team, resulting in its degeneration. CIOs need to spend a lot of time physically and psychologically with their teams, inserting themselves in the midst of the action to continually reinforce the CIO’s values within the team.

Diplomacy and Trade. Collaboration with other companies is a key source of new genetic material and new ways of thinking. We select partners that can teach us things, and we build ideas together. This also means that you have to embrace the frenemy: the company that may, at times, alternate between partner and competitor. These dynamics can be tricky but profitable. Competition raises the bar for everyone and earned mutual respect arises from the tension and combats complacency.

More questions include:

• What skills do you need to have in order to be a Chief Innovation Officer?
• What do you look for when hiring managers?
• What can leaders do to foster collaboration and innovation? t do you look for when hiring managers?
• How does a company become a leader in innovation and not fall behind competitors?
• How does the Chief Innovation Officer interface with other areas of the business to create innovative solutions?

To read the full interview, click here. 

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