What are the new skills and mindsets required for innovation leaders today? Due to constant change in a dynamic and digitally connected world, there is a growing need for leaders who can inspire, connect, and engage across the organization. Yet there are few models and limited research on what it takes to lead innovation in a global and digitally connected environment. 

 

The ISPIM Innovation Leadership group has been created in order to focus on the role of leadership in facilitating innovation. This requires attention to human-centric skills and competencies for empowering employees while creating value for customers around the world.​​​​

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Welcome to the Innovation Leadership Competency Index

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Innovation leadership is a practice that inspires and enables people, teams, organizations, and ecosystems to create meaningful and sustainable innovation. In today’s rapidly changing and interconnected world, innovation leadership requires more than individual expertise - it depends on the ability to collaborate, empower others, foster learning, and create shared value across boundaries.

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The Innovation Leadership Competency Framework is an evolving expression of the ongoing work of the ISPIM Innovation Leadership Special Interest Group (SIG), an international community of researchers, practitioners, and innovation leaders dedicated to advancing innovation leadership theory and practice.

 

The framework is built around four interconnected dimensions of innovation leadership

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Self Leadership

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Focused on the personal foundations of innovation leadership through:

• Self-Awareness — understanding one’s behaviours, values, strengths, and emotional impact

• Creative Confidence — engaging openly with uncertainty, complexity, experimentation, and new possibilities

 

Team Leadership

 

Focused on enabling collective engagement and collaboration through:

• Shared Direction & Ownership — building shared understanding, involvement, and commitment

• Driving Collaboration — helping people align efforts, reconnect, and make meaningful progress together

 

Organizational Leadership

 

Focused on creating environments where innovation can thrive through:

• Psychological Safety & Learning — enabling openness, experimentation, learning, and thoughtful risk-taking

• Diversity & Empowerment — integrating diverse perspectives while empowering people to contribute and act confidently

 

Ecosystem Leadership

 

Focused on innovation across organizational and societal boundaries through:

• Shared Value Creation — identifying opportunities to create greater value collaboratively across networks

• Collaborative Governance — building trust, shared responsibility, stakeholder alignment, and distributed leadership

 

This assessment represents one of the SIG’s ongoing initiatives to experiment with reflective and practice-oriented tools that support innovation leadership development. It is designed not as a test, but as a learning and reflection process that helps individuals, teams, and organizations better understand their current innovation leadership capacities and identify opportunities for future growth.

Your participation contributes to the continued evolution of the framework and to the broader international conversation on innovation leadership research and practice.

 

👉 Click below to begin the assessment.