Nine Critical Roles Your Company Needs for Strategic Innovation

ENRLMKT2-758_InnovationIllustration_1200x630-01
Listen

It’s a well-known fact that innovation is vital in today’s business world. And, strategic innovation requires skilled people. In the right roles. With clear paths to advance careers. Yet, a major challenge to businesses lies in the way they select, develop, and reward these people.

In their book Beyond the Champion: Institutionalizing Innovation Through People, Babson Professors Gina O’Connor and Andrew Corbett identify nine key roles that businesses must fill to achieve strategic innovation—a must in today’s business world.

“We are talking about the people who take inventions and turn them into commercial reality,” O’Connor says, describing employees who contribute to strategic innovation.

She also points out a common problem. It’s hard for companies to manage strategic innovation talent when they don’t develop key innovation roles, both at the leadership level, middle management, and below.

Take the Strategic Innovation Role Assessment and see how your company is doing.
Download Now

Functions. People. Roles. Strategic Innovation.

O’Connor’s book draws on the results of a four-year study. She combines that with decades of additional academic research, hundreds of interviews with corporate innovators, and ongoing consulting to help companies build the capability. Her work has influenced the ISO 9000’s guidance on innovation, and is taught on numerous campuses worldwide.

O’Connor outlines three core functions needed for strategic innovation: discovery, incubation, and acceleration.

Discovery can be thought of as the business concept development phase. Incubation turns the concept into a business proposal. Acceleration is the competency of scaling the emerging business as it picks up steam in the market. These three organizational competencies lay the foundation for strategic innovation and breakthrough innovation.

Within each of these, there are key roles and responsibilities. Companies must fill these roles. They must set career tracks. Only once these systems are in place can companies achieve true strategic innovation on a sustained basis.

Strategic Innovation Roles

So, who do you need on your team in order to achieve strategic innovation? According to O’Connor, there are nine unique roles.

  1. Opportunity Generator
    This person talks about strategic options for the company to consider. She speaks in a way that other people will understand. She translates the work that R&D does to a broader audience.
  2. Opportunity Domain Leader
    This person shapes the opportunities generated by their team into larger business platforms.
  3. Opportunity Generator
    This person presents the company with new business possibilities that are game-changing. She also ensures that new ideas have the right climate to grow.
  4. New Business Creation Specialist
    This person takes opportunities from discovery and tests them from every angle.
  5. New Business Platform Leader
    This person positions the learning from the tests into a strategy for a new business platform and executes on it. These new business platforms will reinvent the company over time.
  6. Director of Incubation
    This senior role manages a portfolio of new business platforms. She also looks after the health of the entire strategic innovation system.
  7. Functional Manager
    This person has deep experience in an area of expertise. She is a creative problem-solver who is on the hook for delivering.
  8. General Manager, New Business
    This is the manager of the emerging businesses. She must deliver just like any manager, though she is not part of the mainstream.
  9. Innovation Council
    This is a group of senior leaders responsible for governing the strategic innovation function and advancing new businesses that will ensure the company has a promising future. Investing in strategic innovation is likely to gain more traction across the top of a business.

The book also maps these roles onto clear pathways to advance careers. The result? A blueprint for strategic innovation that any organization can use to become more systematic with respect to strategic innovation.

Posted in Insights

More from Insights »

Latest Stories

Man and woman listen to a pitch
Lessons from the Heart of Babson’s Summer Venture Program   Each summer, Babson’s Summer Venture Program gives student founders the tools, mentorship, and momentum to accelerate their ventures. Meet four advisors who are helping shape the next generation of entrepreneurial leaders—one insight at a time.
By
July 22, 2025

Posted in Community, Entrepreneurial Leadership

Side-by-side screenshots of the moment caught on camera
When Scandal Strikes the C-Suite: What Two Babson Professors Say Companies Should Do  A viral Coldplay kiss cam moment involving a CEO and human resources leader at a tech startup rocked the company to its core. Babson management professors provided insight into how ventures can survive a leadership scandal.
By
Hillary Chabot
Writer
Hillary Chabot
Hillary Chabot is a writer for Babson Thought & Action and Babson Magazine. An award-winning journalist, she is known for her insightful reporting and dedication to detailed storytelling. With a career spanning over two decades, she has covered a wide range of topics, from presidential campaigns and government policy to neighborhood issues and investigative series. As a reporter for The Boston Herald, Hillary earned a reputation for tenacity and integrity. Her work at Babson College fuels her passions—to learn something new every day and conduct thoughtful, empathic interviews. She’s thrilled to be at Babson College, where students, faculty, staff members and classes provide compelling copy daily.
July 21, 2025

Posted in Insights

Businesswoman practices deep breathing exercise at workplace desk
How Employees Navigate Mental Illness in the Workplace and What Employers Can Do to Help Emily Rosado-Solomon, an assistant professor at Babson, looks at how employees with mental illness handle their symptoms while at work, a topic that is understudied.
By
John Crawford
Senior Journalist
John Crawford
A writer for Babson Thought & Action and the Babson Magazine, John Crawford has been telling the College’s entrepreneurial story for more than 15 years. Assignments for Babson have taken him from Rwanda to El Salvador, from the sweet-smelling factory of a Pennsylvania candy maker, to the stately Atlanta headquarters of an NFL owner, to the bustling office of a New York City fashion designer. Beyond his work for Babson, he has written articles and essays for The Philadelphia Inquirer, Notre Dame Magazine, The Good Men Project, and other publications. He can be found on Twitter, @crawfordwriter, where he tweets about climate change.
July 17, 2025

Posted in Insights