At a certain point a myth got started that management was a valid profession in itself and it was perfectly fine for a non-technical person to make technical decisions. And for most businesses today, growth and innovation is going to come from better use of technology.
"Non-technical" (I love that word) professional managers are thus incapable of either coming up with innovative ideas or recognizing the opportunities when they do come up because they simply don't understand them well enough. For the same reason, they're unlikely to make well informed choices between priorities. Even ex-technical people that moved into management still make bad decisions because they often don't really keep up with new technology and the changing technology landscape. They might go to conferences and surf slashdot but they aren't in a position to actually apply that knowledge so it ends up being practically useless. If they're asked how to approach a problem they often just use the approach they would have went with 10 years ago before they became managers because that is what they truly know and understand (because, unsurprisingly, you have to do something to understand it).
You seem to be making the wrong assumption that innovation is technology..? On the other hand you talk about growth and innovation coming from better use of technology. Innovation is a behavioral outcome, it's about behavior and its implications. The problem so far is that decisions of behavioral nature is taken by managers for one reason or the other not qualified to do so...
The problem is that most technical people are also bad prioritizing things: making wrong assumptions about how the product is going to used, assuming that if it is technically difficult it must be valuable, wanting to rewrite things when that is too expensive, wanting to use the latest shinny technologies.
"Non-technical" (I love that word) professional managers are thus incapable of either coming up with innovative ideas or recognizing the opportunities when they do come up because they simply don't understand them well enough. For the same reason, they're unlikely to make well informed choices between priorities. Even ex-technical people that moved into management still make bad decisions because they often don't really keep up with new technology and the changing technology landscape. They might go to conferences and surf slashdot but they aren't in a position to actually apply that knowledge so it ends up being practically useless. If they're asked how to approach a problem they often just use the approach they would have went with 10 years ago before they became managers because that is what they truly know and understand (because, unsurprisingly, you have to do something to understand it).