Being an innovation leader in banking might be the toughest job in Corporate America.

Consider Comerica, a Top 50 bank based in Dallas. The bank is now working up its  innovation unit and hiring an “innovation leader” to run it. This innovation leader will be asked to do all the things innovation leaders do — and then some. Of course, there is the expectation that the innovation leader will deliver “potential marketplace differentiation,” install an innovation process, and drive organization improvement.

But consider all the additional, inward-facing responsibilities of this innovation leader:

• Negotiate with and provide direction to senior and executive managers to create and execute innovation goals and objectives.
• Coordinate across multi-disciplinary teams to spread innovation expertise to each area of the Service Company in an effort to drive self-service enablement of challenge framework.
• Build a network of innovation champions to foster innovation and ensure connectivity of our corporate objectives with Business Unit specific operational goals.
• Responsible for advising and influencing Lines of Business as future demand requires expansion to entire enterprise.
• Is recognized as the innovation expert and manages an innovation pipeline for the Service Company.

In other words, as much as this innovation leader will be working on innovations for Comerica customers, she will be working on innovating Comerica. In fact, there is not one mention of “customers” in the Comerica job ad. To innovate for customers is hard enough, but to excel at innovating products and an enterprise — that’s tough.