Innovation is becoming more external to companies and more social.

When Netflix’s internal engineers struggled to get more than incremental improvements in the company’s movie matching algorithm, the company put the problem to the internet and crowdsourced a 10% leap in accuracy (of course, it didn’t hurt that they offered a million dollar prize). Even funding for innovation is becoming more external and social. A website called Kickstarter lets anyone—not just venture capitalists—fund innovation projects featured on the site.

Social media management and innovation
This shift in innovation has big implications for marketing. ITSMA’s social media research (free excerpt available) shows that marketing is responsible for monitoring social media and for training, governing, and supporting the organization in using social media. I think this means that marketing must be ready to take a larger role in facilitating the innovation process and in being the ears to the ground on all the innovation that’s happening externally to organizations out there on the internet.

CMOs can succeed where CIOs struggled
Marketing is in a similar position today to where IT was in the 90s. Back then, the rise of reengineering and enterprise software systems gave CIOs a unique opportunity to be facilitators of innovation. They were the only C-level executives involved in all the efforts to rethink the ways that companies did work across the entire organization. Sadly, few CIOs took advantage of this cross-company view to innovate the ways that their companies did things. (In CIOs’ defense, few companies felt comfortable giving CIOs the power to do this sort of thing.)

Move beyond brand stewardship
Today, CMOs have the same opportunity that CIOs did back in the 90s. Marketing is essentially in charge of collaboration both inside and outside the company through its leading role in social media. CMOs have to resist the tendency to view this stewardship as simply a continuation of their traditional role as the head of branding and communications. For CMOs, social media aren’t just for listening to what people are saying about the brand or pushing out messages. Social media aren’t even just for facilitating conversation and customer relationships. Social media are also for innovation, and marketing has a major role to play in making it happen.

Examples of the mandate for innovation
In a blog post this week entitled What CEOs Want from Their CMOs, Forrester’s CEO, George Colony, discusses the mandate for the CMO to keep an eye out for what’s ahead. I wrote a case study a few years ago about how IT services firm CSC has an innovation process that is facilitated by marketing.

So the question is, will CMOs step up to the innovation challenge? And will CEOs let them?

What do you think?