Insights on the role of a Chief Innovation Officer and optimal ways to establish a productive dialog and enduring relationship.

If you think you’ve got your Chief Innovation Officer contact understood, take a step back and think again. Chances are you are misreading his or her (hereinafter “his” for brevity) intentions, misunderstanding his vocabulary and completely missing the drivers that they consider 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 a company’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, increase industry awareness (5) idea conversion ratio, i.e., how many ideas (and associated investments made into them) make it into a revenue-producing stream, etc. The clarity of understanding the overarching goals of the company’s innovation initiative can be game-changing in aligning your future discussions and with him and potential engagements with the company.

• What is your company’s innovation archetype? Ask him to complete the simple Client Innovation Archetype Assessment. You will need to tune your language and approach accordingly as you determine whether the company is a Sideliner, Tinkerer or Junkie, or anywhere in between. The article accompanying the assessment will give you a few approaches on how to address each of these company archetypes.

• What are the innovation-associated factors driving your, your team’s and your company’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 the 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. For example, if reports to the CIO or CTO, you can deduce that innovation at the company is focused on technological solutions, operational improvement and similar focus areas. If, on the other hand the role reports to a Business Development or Marketing Head, then the CINO’s scope extends across the broad business profile of the company, making him an influential leader in the company, frequently up to the board level.

• 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 or Idea Connections Spigit or partner with companies like the Board of Innovation (see comprehensive list of innovation platforms here) to reach far beyond their internal resources for ideas (i.e., crowd-source). 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 the CINO of the company you’re working with is not in the active part of your virtual 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.