CIO used to mean “Chief Information Officer” and it represented the person in charge of a corporation’s Information Technology initiative. Now that CTO (Chief Technology Officer) has become the norm, the CIO title has been adopted by many companies seeking to appoint someone in charge of innovation and growth – the Chief Innovation Officer.

There’s no doubt innovation is a hot topic. Search Amazon.com on the word “innovation” and more than 180,000 books come back. Search Time magazine and you get nearly 3,000 results. Other evidence comes in the form of the many surveys that have been done by IBM, McKinsey, Deloitte, etc. In one survey by Boston Consulting Group, 81 percent of CEOs listed innovation as one of their top three priorities.

So what’s being done about it? How are CEOs satisfying the demand they’ve created by jumping on the innovation band wagon, and telling their boards and CEOs that they’re focused on innovation? They’re doing what they’ve always done. They’re delegating – in this case to the newly appointed Chief Innovation Officer.

I run into a lot of CIOs these days. They don’t all explicitly have that title — they might be VPs of R&D, SVPs of Corporate Strategy, or Directors of Sales, Marketing and Innovation—but they all have the same objectives. They’ve been tasked with figuring out how to drive innovation in their company. Most of them are doing a lot of reading, attending conferences and possibly reading an occasional blog. And most of them are as confused as ever because they don’t know how to get from here to there – from idea generation to return on investment – with their innovation efforts.

That’s why I’ve set out to help, by creating a program for executives that actually teaches CIOs how to do their jobs. We start with simple things, like writing their job description. And then we set to the task of actually teaching them how to execute on each element of that job description.

It’s a pretty simple concept, but one that seems long overdue.

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