Your Commercial Real Estate CIO Shouldn’t Be the Only One Responsible for Innovation

Abstract

If you were to cut through that corporate jargon, innovation effectively means "To introduce something new." While newness is certainly part of the equation, the way we use innovation has more to it. Alex Goryachev, US technical expert to the International Standards Organization and bestselling author of Fearless Innovation, phrased it perfectly in his book: "Innovation is the thing that every leader demands, yet many don't understand why they need it, or even what it is. Leaders are often very enthusiastic about encouraging everyone to be innovative, yet vague about what it means in practical terms." Because of that, "Innovation" often gets shelved as nothing more than a polysyllabic platitude in the company lingo. Even real estate companies, finally understand that they need to innovate lest they be sidelined, and that realization spawned an entirely new role in the corporate hierarchy: the Chief Innovation Officer or the CIO. By default, the CIO links business and technical divisions inside organizations each organization has different requirements for the background of the individual holding the position. Pixces' white paper wasn't the only source of information that claimed that companies should put all of the responsibility of innovation on the CIO. Deloitte, McKinsey & Co., Harvard Business Review, and even our very own Propmodo all cranked out articles that implored companies to hire CIOs and give them the power to innovate. Vigren told me that when he began his research for his Ph.D. dissertation five years ago that the topic of digital transformation "Almost didn't exist back then. But now it's been growing, and it's been interesting to see these kinds of innovation leader roles emerging along with that." Vigren's academic career led him to collaborate with Cherry Pick People, a UK-based property recruitment specialist, and Unissu, a PropTech procurement marketplace, to conduct a global study that gathered insights from real estate innovation leaders. "Innovation is very difficult, and I think that the first thing you should do if you want to accelerate the digital transformation of the sector is that you should let these innovation leaders work on innovation tasks full-time." The report stresses that innovation leads should have a full-time focus on innovation and that doing so requires very concrete action that leads to organizational change. "As opposed to having one person in charge of innovation, what we found is that it works better if everyone has responsibility for it. Sometimes people think they can just leave innovation to the CIO, and that mindset is really counter-productive." Though the report focused on digital transformation for the built environment, it highlighted the fact that limiting innovation to one role in the C-Suite holds the entire industry back.