IF YOU’RE LIKE MOST CFOs, you’re playing an ever-increasing role in driving enterprise innovation, but you and your finance team still need to evolve in this role. Innovation is essential for company survival, and CFOs are essential for innovation done right. The CFOs we spoke to for this report told us again and again how important it is for senior finance executives and their finance teams to make innovation a priority. As one CFO put it: “We either innovate or we become irrelevant.” Without CFOs providing the right leadership and direction, enterprise innovation initiatives will inevitably fall flat or the wrong initiatives will divert precious resources away from worthy innovation projects. For this report, CFO Research examined the role of finance in enterprise innovation through an online survey of 236 CFOs and other senior finance executives, as well as interviews with seven CFOs of publicly traded, mid-cap companies.