A research-informed pathway for leaders navigating innovation as a systemic capability. Explore what innovation means, why uncertainty changes the work of leadership, and how strategy and organisational learning help ideas become sustained value.
Pathway 01 · Innovation Leadership
Leaders, strategists and people shaping innovation portfolios who need to make sound choices when outcomes cannot be fully predicted in advance.
Back to KIN AcademyKnowledge base
This pathway draws on Christer Windeløv-Lidzélius's work across innovation, complexity, strategy and organisational learning. These connected domains help leaders move beyond treating innovation as a project or department. They offer ways to understand novelty, work with emergent conditions and create the organisational capacity to learn from action.
Knowledge base: Christer Windeløv-Lidzélius
Curriculum in development
Each module connects a core idea to useful work in context. The curriculum and learner environment are being developed; these outlines describe the planned learning, not courses currently available to enrol in.
Build a precise working definition of innovation and distinguish invention, creativity and change from the sustained realisation of new value. Consider who defines value, for whom, and how context shapes the answer.
Intended outcome
Describe an innovation opportunity in terms of novelty, intended value, beneficiaries and evidence that would indicate progress.
Explore how interactions between people, rules, resources and external forces produce patterns that no single actor controls. Use a systems lens to identify leverage points and avoid over-relying on linear plans.
Intended outcome
Map a relevant system boundary, identify important interdependencies and name assumptions that need to be tested.
Separate risk that can be estimated from uncertainty that calls for inquiry. Practise shaping small, informative moves that help a team learn while preserving room to adapt.
Intended outcome
Select a proportionate next experiment, state what it is intended to reveal and define a useful signal for continuing or changing direction.
Connect innovation choices to strategic intent. Examine how organisations balance a portfolio of opportunities, make trade-offs and align exploration with the value they are seeking to create.
Intended outcome
Explain how an innovation initiative supports a strategic priority and identify the portfolio choices or constraints it depends on.
Consider the leadership work that makes innovation possible: framing direction, enabling agency, protecting learning and making decisions at the right level. Focus on practices, not personality types.
Intended outcome
Identify a leadership behaviour or decision mechanism to change, and describe how that change could enable responsible experimentation.
Treat learning as an organisational capability rather than a retrospective event. Connect action, reflection and shared knowledge so that insights can influence future decisions and ways of working.
Intended outcome
Design a simple learning loop that captures evidence, makes an interpretation explicit and carries a resulting adjustment into practice.
Learning in context
The learning environment is being developed around applied work in each learner's organisational context. Activities will connect frameworks to live strategic questions, with reflection and evidence helping leaders show what they learned and how it changed their next decision.
Pathway questions
This pathway is grounded in Christer Windeløv-Lidzélius's innovation, complexity, strategy and organisational learning domains. It focuses on how leaders can create conditions for innovation in complex organisations.
No. The curriculum and learning environment are in development. The modules describe the current pathway architecture and intended learning, not a live course or enrolment offer.
The ISO 56000 series is a standards backbone across Academy pathways, providing shared innovation management language and principles. It is not a certification of this pathway or of a learner.