Chief Innovation Officer and Head of Innovation in Germany

What a Chief Innovation Officer does

A Chief Innovation Officer decides which new technologies a company tests, stops the tests that fail, and takes the ones that work into products and daily work. Head of Innovation and innovation director are titles for similar positions. In a smaller company one person often holds the position next to the lead of product or IT.

The CTO builds the product the company sells today, and the CIO runs the IT it works with today. The Chief Innovation Officer works on what the company could sell or use later, and needs both of them to put a result into operation.

Four gates from idea to product

An innovation budget goes to many ideas at once, so every idea has to pass the same gates. This is the process I bring into a company, with a case from my own work for each gate.

Gate	Question at the gate	What passes it	Case from my work
1. Scouting	Does the technology solve a task a customer or a colleague has today?	A named task and a person who wants the change	I have attended more than 250 blockchain events and write about digital assets for Business Punk. Ideas come from there; the gate decides which get a test
2. Test	Does it work on the company’s own data, under its rules?	A measured result, checked by a person or a script, never by the tool that produced it	At a client a read-only script measures each agent’s result, because an agent once reported a count for a wider area than its task named
3. Pilot	Does one team use it in daily work without new risks?	Written limits that a machine enforces: rights, approvals, a way to stop it	AI coding agents at a client cannot push to the production branch, and a person confirms each production change outside the chat
4. Product	Will customers pay for it, and can the company sign for it?	Customers, contracts and an owner in operations	In summer 2022 I took a market-data product on digital assets from concept to institutional customers. In 2023 I helped write its terms and its API methodologies
Stop	Did the idea fail a gate?	A written reason, and the team goes back to its daily work	On blockchain projects I ask first whether a chain has a real purpose in the task. Where it has none, the idea stops before anyone writes code

An idea that stops at the second gate has cost one test. The gates keep the budget for the ideas that pass.

New technology I have taken into operation, newest first

• Since June 2026: Lecturer at Claude Hacker House in Frankfurt, with sessions on prompting, AI-assisted workflows, MCP servers and virtual organizations.
• Since April 2026: AI Engineer in Platform Transformation. With Claude and Codex I help a client break up a monolithic application. The work has produced more than 300 RESTful API endpoints and more than 8,000 commits.
• May 2024: expert member of the Product Advisory Committee of the Digital Token Identifier Foundation, the registration authority for ISO 24165.
• 2022 to October 2024: at the Frankfurt-based company Blocksize Capital, Head of Decentralized Finance and Node Operations, then Chief Information Officer from January 2023. I moved the node infrastructure from Azure to another cloud with a failover site.
• Since 2015: Bitcoin miners and blockchain nodes of my own. I’m still running nodes today.
• 2004 to 2010: chief technology officer and chief innovation officer at a global real estate database. As innovation officer I coordinated the building of the web products.

Details: Career stages.

Who I am

I am Michael Wutzke from Frankfurt. Before the fintech I built web portals for life insurance at Policen Direkt and online shops for Lidl and REWE at Valentins (Burda Digital), so I know what a new idea meets in an existing business. As CIO I explained to decision-makers at banks and stock exchanges, in plain words, why institutional users need compliant market data. In 2022 I started an event series on blockchain and decentralized finance in Frankfurt with three colleagues, and the community Finance Loop grew out of it. The community has more than 4,000 members. I hold a training authorization from IHK Frankfurt for two IT apprenticeships. Details: Teaching and certifications.