Leadership in projects with innovative component

Abstract

Innovations become a crucial part of success path for many companies in various industries. Project approach is very often chosen as the most practical method of processes organization to manage innovative products and services. The combination of both creates new challenges to the leaders of the projects with innovative component. The main goal of this study is to define the competencies and aspects that play important role in the portfolio of the project leaders dealing with innovations. This topic is widely discussed by the scholars; however, the angles that are usually chosen by the authors do not cover the connection of all three aspects of leadership, project management and innovation, providing both qualitative and quantitative data. Additionally, very few articles focus on the negative aspects that should be avoided in such projects. This gap was detected by the author of this Master thesis and lead to formation of two-step research on competencies and negative aspects that can affect the efficiency of the workflow in projects with innovative component, combining the semi-structured interviews with experts and questionnaire distributed among the society of leading Project Management associations. The former was used mainly to test the framework, derived from extensive theory analysis, and the latter was dedicated to gather the opinions of the project leaders on the proposed competencies and their importance. The main outcome of the study is the conclusion that the leader of a project with innovative component should possess outstanding communication skills, be able to spread the impact on the colleagues and generate support from the upper management, besides the leader should avoid judgmental behavior and be able to take risk responsibly. To sum up, the leader of such project should be the center of the project not only from the managerial point of view, but also represent the change, the genuine curiosity and inspiration, attracting the talented people to contribute to the project success.