Strategic Initiatives, Innovation and Incubation

The Strategic Initiatives, Innovation and Incubation Manager will support the incubation, conceptualization, and piloting of new ventures for IB, and transitioning these successfully to BAU departments for sustainable implementation.

The incumbent will have strong project management, delivery, design thinking and solutionizing skills and competencies in addition to impeccable organizational skills to:
**Product innovation and design thinking**
1. assist the Head of Strategic Initiatives, Innovation and Incubation with ideating, designing, managing and executing multiple strategic initiatives and innovations to drive growth and increase uptake of IB’s product and services
2. Drive innovation think tanks/boot camps for Ideation and concept designs.
3. Connect strategic initiatives and innovations to strategic business needs as well as customer needs.
4. Drive design thinking in everything that SIII team does.
5. Providing best practices in strategic design for new products/services
**Product management and delivery**
6. Provide project management with regular and timely project status updates, feedback, and appropriate reporting on key, process and outcome focused objectives.
7. Seek support and involvement from internal and external stakeholders to ensure strategic initiatives and innovations under consideration are fit for purpose
8. Drive change management by providing appropriate tools and templates in a consistent way across the various project teams to ensure BAU and out-of-the-ordinary process, initiatives, activities are clearly understood, planned, developed and delivered.
9. identify and mitigate risks
10. integrate marketing and communication in order to align the SIII team’s objectives within their BAU work streams
11. drafting legal contracts, MOUs and MOCs to establish new partnerships with governmental, non-governmental organizations as needed.
**Customer needs and data analytics**
12. ensure decisions with regard to new strategic initiatives and innovations are informed by data and insights available both within and outside the IB.
13. Understand stakeholder needs deeply by developing appropriate systems and processes to capture data and insights to create user profiles, user scenarios or user stories to inform the ongoing development and implementation of initiatives and innovations.
14. report and communicate in a timely and efficient manner to engage stakeholders in the implementation process
**Transitioning of strategic initiatives and innovation to BAU**
15. assist the Head of Strategic Initiatives, Innovation and Incubation with successfully transitioning the new initiatives and/or innovations from initial shared conceptualization to pilot stage into becoming a standard business as usual offering by ensuring a systematic handover to the relevant internal IB departments.

**Overall Team Productivity**
16. think analytically and creatively, deploy technology where appropriate to bring efficiencies, effectiveness and enhance the SIII team’s productivity
17. ask the right questions for the purpose of developing a point of view that will influence decisions

**Knowledge and Experience Requirements**
- Bachelor’s degree in the field of Education / Education Development, Innovation and Design Thinking related fields.
- Past experience with proven track record in managing large scale implementation in a related field on global scale.
- 3-4 years of relevant professional experience in management consulting, strategy, technology, marketing or a related industry is a plus
- Value the opportunity to make new connections and provide interconnected support, proven collaborator and able to develop a 360 degree view and understanding of the IB
- Knowledge of IB programs is a must