If you think you’ve got your Chief Innovation Officer client contact understood, take a step back and think again. Chances are you are misreading his intentions, misunderstanding his vocabulary and completely missing the drivers that he considers important, including the impact criteria that he is being measured on by his organization.

The Chief Innovation Officer (CINO) role is a curious amalgam of a corporate function and that of a creative leader. On any given day the CINO will attend a budget planning meeting in the morning and listen to fast pitches from several promising startups in the afternoon. He feels equally comfortable speaking “wall street” as he is addressing a developer’s conference. He embodies the Gartner definition of innovation – “Invention applied.”

As you strive to develop a relationship with your client’s CINO, there are 5 key questions you should be asking him, in each instance making sure you digest and understand the meaning and consequences of the responses he gives you:

• How is innovation measured at your organization? Typical criteria include (1) increased sales funnel, i.e. more future revenues (2) better quality sales funnel, i.e. more strategic future revenues, (3) cultural change – more quality ideas from staff, more controlled experimentation, (4) brand impact, (5) idea conversion ratio, etc. The clarity of understanding the overarching goals of the client’s innovation initiative can be game-changing.
• What is your company’s innovation archetype? Ask him to complete the AT&T simple Client Innovation Archetype assessment. You will need to tune your language and approach accordingly as you determine whether your client is a Sideliner, Tinkerer or Junkie, or anywhere in between. The article “How innovative are you as a service provider” will give you a few approaches to address each of these client archetypes.
• What are the innovation-associated factors driving your and your team’s reward system? Understand whether there is a blend of short term and long term rewards. From this you can derive whether the CINO is narrowly focused on making an impact on specific areas of the business, in a specific time frame, or is he driving holistic transformation across the enterprise.
• What corporate function does your, i.e. CINO role report to? This will shed light on who controls the innovation purse string and which areas of the business are likely to be impacted most directly by the CINO’s initiatives.
• Where do you source your innovation? You might be surprised to hear that many organizations outsource this function, using open innovation platforms such as Innocentive, Innovation Exchange or Spigit (see comprehensive list here) to reach far beyond their internal resources for ideas. These types of companies will welcome you as a strategic partner in the ideation process. Closed companies are more likely to push back on your attempts to contribute to their innovation effort.

If your client’s CINO is not in the active part of your Rolodex yet, perhaps it’s because you haven’t established a dialog with him using the vocabulary and language he speaks. You will find a more direct path to uncovering innovation opportunities by asking him the right questions rather than forcing your conversation on him.