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What if corporate America threw an innovation party and everyone came?

Since the late 1990s, companies have been enthusiastically populating their executive suites with a new addition: chief innovation officers. The idea is to anoint a top-ranking leader to shepherd new products and ideas to profitability. But several years into the trend, the results are mixed.

DuPont has a chief innovation officer. So do Coca-Cola and PepsiCo. Chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices appointed one, as did banking giant Citigroup, health insurer Humana, consumer packaged-goods titan Kimberly-Clark, and Google. Even the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, a marine research laboratory, has one.

The addition to the C-suite makes sense, given business's mania for all things innovative. In 2006, 40 percent of companies cited innovation as their number-one strategic priority, according to a survey by The Boston Consulting Group (BCG). That’s double the number of the prior year.

Such centralized control of the innovation process, including identifying product ideas, engineering them and bringing them to market, leads to healthier businesses. According to a report by the Boston-based Aberdeen Group research firm, 60 percent of best-in-class companies — those that topped the list for the number of  products that met revenue, product-cost and launch-date targets — had a chief product officer or chief innovation officer.

The position of chief innovation officer is useful "to the extent it helps give a voice to innovation at the most senior levels of the organization," says Henry Chesbrough, executive director of the Center for Open Innovation at UC Berkeley and author of the new book, Open Business Models: How to Thrive in the New Innovation Landscape. "It's not useful if that means everyone else thinks innovation is no longer part of their jobs."

Business guru Geoffrey Moore is skeptical. In an op-ed piece earlier this year, he wrote that the need for a chief innovation officer as a myth. Innovation should create differentiation that leads to customer preference during buying decisions, he noted, and that's a core business strategy for the entire organization, not just one department.

In addition to appointing chief innovation officers, companies have been digging deep into corporate coffers to fund their innovation efforts. A whopping 72 percent planned to boost their innovation spending in 2006, according to a survey earlier this year by BCG.

But attention and expenses don't always correlate with profits: BCG's survey also turned up the following finding — nearly one out of two companies reported it was unhappy with its return on innovation spending.

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