Auburn University'Role of Leadership in Management of Innovation'Graduate Student Paper-MGMT 6560-LeadershipPrashant Malyala4-21-2014Introduction:This paper talks about the role of leadership in management of technological innovation. The topic of innovation management is briefly explained with an emphasis on the potential of an innovation and the strategic innovation process. Before analyzing the role of leadership in innovation management, it is important to understand the role of technological trends and innovation strategy. Managing innovation requires a different human side of management, especially from a leadership perspective. Innovation Management, simply put, is the art of managing innovation in multidisciplinary fields of study. I believe that from a leadership perspective it allows you to develop capabilities to drive innovation and leverage expertise from different fields of technical expertise. After briefly introducing the concept of innovation management and the various innovation models, this document moves on to talk about managing different innovation groups and project teams. This is followed by discussion on the leadership of technical professionals from various industries in innovative teams. The discussion is supported by academic research from various sources cited at the end of this document. The discussion places a strong emphasis on managing creativity in high-performance technical teams and the role of leadership in motivating and maintaining an organizational structure. It is integrated with analysis of the leadership style of two individuals working in innovative teams and leading high-performance engineering projects. Leadership analytics is related to the concepts... middle of paper... provides incentives for excellence in a method where information will flow in the shortest possible time to the right goals for decision making. Leadership plays a crucial role in motivating people to stretch and apply themselves in a non-traditional organizational structure which will be discussed later in this report. Leadership is also responsible for adopting what this case study calls three generic strategies to protect their bottom line. The first is to collaborate with others to maximize your chances of achieving a dominant design. The second is the block in which the firm guarantees to prevent others from imitating its innovation through the use of patents and other binding legal constraints to do so. The third strategy known as "rush" where the company frequently introduces new products, cannibalizing its own products before anyone else does.