PMGM7001 Chap.9 Leading Innovation with Complementary Partners
Leading Innovation with Complementary Partners
The session's three elements
The syllabus session on leading innovation covers vision and purpose, leading innovation and leading followers.
The course overview says modern leadership adds value and creates new value, with innovation as the end point, and it names vision and purpose as the tool.
A vision with a user in it
The case is Mapxus, a start-up that maps the insides of buildings cheaply with artificial intelligence and existing Wi-Fi.
Its vision came from its chief executive's memories of poorly stored information at the city's rail operator and of a deadly fire in which people could not find their way out. The product serves navigation generally and people with visual impairments in particular.
Two founders, divided leadership
The chief executive describes himself as macroscopic and his co-founder as microscopic.
One brought technology depth and a route from research to commercial use; the other brought industry and product sense, communication, and cost discipline, cutting the staff roughly in half when the company grew faster than its cash.
Leading followers
The founders combine demanding standards with a consensus style: small teams, a say for every member, failure treated as learning, and public credit for whoever makes a breakthrough.
Loyalty followed, including through a crisis in which staff deferred salaries. The case ends as a large funding round approaches, asking whether the style should change and how to keep a small, hard-to-replace team together.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Vision and purpose as a leadership tool
- 02
Where the company's vision came from
- 03
Good-enough accuracy and a low-cost product
- 04
Macro and micro: dividing leadership
- 05
Cost discipline in the cash crisis
- 06
Consensus, high standards and safe failure
- 07
Credit and loyalty in a small team
- 08
Patents, partners and scale
Worked example · free
Allocate leadership between two founders
- 2Identify each founder's complementary strength.
- 2Assign decision areas accordingly.
- 2Keep one thing jointly owned.
Key terms
- Complementary Leadership
- Leadership shared between partners whose strengths differ, each leading the decisions that fit their strengths under a common vision.
- Vision and Purpose
- A statement of why an organisation exists and the future it is trying to create, which guides what counts as good enough.
- Leading Followers
- Earning the effort and loyalty of the people who do the work, through trust, voice, credit and a safe place to fail.
Leading Innovation with Complementary Partners FAQ
What made the start-up's innovation succeed?
The case points to a specific vision that let the founders accept good-enough accuracy, a partnership in which technology and commercial discipline were led by different people, and a team led so that experimentation was safe and credit was shared. A critical answer adds the fragility of depending on a small core team.
Is a consensus style compatible with high standards?
The case shows both at once. The chief executive demanded robust, high-quality data and some staff left because of it, while decisions within the team were made by consensus and failure was treated as learning. Standards concern the output; consensus concerns how the team reaches it.
Why does the case mention patents?
Because the chief executive keeps patent filings to a minimum so as not to reveal information to competitors. It is one of several choices the case leaves open, each trading protection of what the small team has built against growth beyond it.
Assessment move
Draw two columns for the founders and fill each with the decisions the case shows him leading, then add a third column for what they share. That picture answers most of paper topic six and gives you a tool for dividing roles in your own group.
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