Many organizations seek ways to stimulate and encourage staff innovation. One ofthese is leadership that can boost staff innovation behavior. The aim of thisarticle is to reflect on leadership and its contribution to stimulating innovation. To achieve the aim of the article—and to verify the hypotheses—deductive inference, the analysis of the subject literature and the author’s own questionnaire were used. The research was carried out with an original questionnaire to assess the role of a leader in stimulating innovative activity. The questionnaire consists of 28 statements.The analysis of the results of the empirical research has confirmed the research hypotheses that the role of a leader is to stimulate the creativity of employees and reward their innovative behavior.The analysis of the role of leadership in stimulating organizational innovation showed that the vast majority of statements concerning the role of leadership achieved a mean score above 5.0 (86%)—an average level. The research suggests that leaders should first and foremost play the following roles in stimulating innovation (e.g., a performer/creator of employee creativity and a promoter of rewarding the innovative behavior of employees).

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Innovation Process Models With Emphasis on Open Innovation ModelThis article presents different models of innovation processes and focuses in particular on the open innovation. The empirical part is based on the findings on the innovation cooperation of enterprises in the EU and OECD (these data, among others, determine the open innovation). At the end of the article there is a case study of Nokia which implements the open innovation in its innovation activity. The aim of this article is to present the paradigm of the open innovation processes. This approach concentrates on sharing knowledge, i.e. making new solutions available to other units by means of e.g. license sale. The open innovation business model takes advantage of both internal and external sources of ideas without a fear that a company's own ideas when transferred to another organization will lead to the company's loss of profits coming from this idea. The formal framework of an organization is just a symbolic one and makes the flow of knowledge between the organization and its environment possible. The enterprises that adopt the open innovation strategy both enthusiastically develop ideas which were created by others as well as make their own ideas available to other organizations that find them more interesting.

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