Abstract
As stated in the introduction to this section, Peter Senge in the Fifth Discipline asked organization leaders to consider that the most “influential” position on a ship might not be the captain, but rather the ship’s architect. In this chapter, we draw upon examples from a variety of settings, ranging from the history of ship design, revolutionary ideas tried out in the built environment (buildings, urban design, etc.) by Frank Lloyd Wright, to more recent and agile instantiations of architecture in the software industry. In doing so, we argue that to an organization engaged in distributed innovation needs leadership at multiple levels within many organizations. To an extent, every innovation leader in such settings inherently plays the role of an architect by exploiting emerging scientific capabilities, by having the vision for change, and by purposefully decomposing and integrating the interactions among key human elements on behalf of developers and customers during the innovation process.
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Anderson, E.G., Joglekar, N.R. (2012). The Leader as an Architect. In: The Innovation Butterfly. Understanding Complex Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-3131-2_8
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