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Chief Innovation Officers — Who are they? Why do you need them?

The Chief Innovation Officer title has grown exponentially in the last 10 years. There are ~430,000 people with the title on LinkedIn as of today.

Varun Mallapragada
5 min readJun 14, 2021

Popularly referred to as the CIO or the CINO. I have seen cases where the “I” in CIO evolved from Information to Innovation. Not going to debate which acronym is correct.

The CIO’s role used to be about managing information/data, IT systems and knowledge bases. Now, it’s all about creating a competitive edge by accelerating R&D, conceptualising new products/services and building an inclusive culture of innovation. And hence, the Chief ‘Information’ Officer role has evolved into the Chief ‘Innovation’ Officer role at large companies.

“54% of innovating companies struggle to bridge the gap between innovation strategy and business strategy.”

-PwC’s Innovation Benchmark 2017

The world of business is rapidly changing, so much so that you can say it’s transforming at scale since the last few decades. With the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, “change” as a business subject is much more real to each one of us…

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Varun Mallapragada
Varun Mallapragada

Written by Varun Mallapragada

I write about entrepreneurship, business strategy and innovation.

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