CIO: How can leaders cultivate the culture of innovation at their organization, and what examples have you seen of successful organizations that innovate?

Schrage: You take the word leader or and substitute the word dad, father, or fatherhood. Because I think--I take that back, I don't think, I observe that a lot of this quest for leadership is a cry for dad. It's a cry for, oh, top management doesn't approve it. Oh, that means daddy doesn't like it. My notion of what effective leadership is, you create an environment that gives people the opportunity to display the , and if you're doing a halfway decent job-not even a great job, a halfway decent job-of hiring people and creating an environment for them, you're going to discover that you're going to have more good ideas, more good hypotheses and more good experiments than you know what to do with.

The real challenge of top management should not be to create a , it should be to where people understand the innovation priorities. Top management should manifest and display the judgment, i.e., , these are all terrific innovations, but for the purposes of this organization, we're selecting these kinds, and here's why. And that clarity of communication, combined with that empowering environment, creates a lovely innovation flow. It shouldn't be, oh, we need to innovate, we need to innovate. That shouldn't be top management's problem. Top management's problem should be, geez, these ideas are so good, these proposals are so good, how do we prioritize them? That's the kind of problem an editor should want with their publication, that's the kind of problem a CEO should want with his or hers.

As for organizations that actually do these things well, forgive rounding up the usual suspects. I think that is a very good example of this. Some of the organizations that I've worked with-NASDAQ and Mars and -are definitely making commitments to facilitating not necessarily bottom-up innovation but middle-up innovation. There's the recognition that we have these enormous resources. How do we facilitate collaboration that leads to innovation? It used to be specialization that leads to innovation. Now it's, how do we create interoperability between specializations to facilitate new genres of innovation?

CIO: Should innovation be done for its own sake, or should there be an ultimate goal of the innovative organization?