Innovation Program Manager

Job Description

1.     Support CIO to define the innovation strategy, define the success

-       Support CIO to define the innovation strategy and a roadmap towards the desired innovation-driven mode. The ‘innovation team’ needs to define what innovation is in the context of the company, and how to ‘get there’. It must identify the milestones and define the metrics and success criteria across the innovation transformation journey.

-       To properly set the innovation strategy, the team must demonstrate a deep understanding of the current state of the company, the challenges, and be able to spot the business opportunities. The dream team must be capable of capturing and interpreting market and competition insights, trends, and predictions; they must clearly articulate and communicate the vision of the company and the master plan that will transform it into an innovation-driven organization

2.     Provide a framework for innovation

-       Identify and provide the right enabling technologies to facilitate day-to-day innovation activities and to speed up the adoption of the innovation culture.

3.     Innovate by example

Innovation is an exciting and inspiring topic, but if you don't deliver concrete examples of applied innovation — ideally through success stories — its power will quickly fade out.

-       The ‘innovation dream team’ must have creative members, engineers, and technologists to showcase real innovation, at pace; the team needs to clearly connect the theoretical, abstract notions of innovation with the commercial context of your company; it must demonstrate how innovation can bring concrete commercial results, fast. This is the best way to inspire people and drive high levels of engagement with the overall innovation initiative.

4.     Deploy, Communicate, Inspire, Diffuse

-       Communication in this context is critical: no matter how innovative your team or how efficient the innovation framework is, if the communication is not effective, the innovation initiative is at risk. Proper communication is the way to spread the innovation message and inspire people to join the ‘new way of working’; to prove that innovation creates value for the company, the employees, the customers, and possibly for the society; to diffuse great ideas and change how products are conceived, designed and built.

5.     Measure Innovation, drive improvement

-       Systematically measure and evaluate the progress towards each next milestone of the innovation transformation program. In case of gaps or ‘surprises’, the team needs to quickly review the assumptions, the involved models and processes, and make the right decisions in an agile manner- to ensure alignment with the overall strategic innovation plan.

6.     Support CIO to handle the noise and avoid disruption

-       Innovation can generate noise and become disruptive. The ‘innovation dream team’ must prevent the situation where the standard KPIs of the company are exposed to risk due to aggressive, over-ambitious innovation programs or, for example, due to unexpected response to a ‘call to innovate’. The team must handle the noise and be very effective in identifying the signals, that is, the real business opportunities. It must be able to prioritize wisely and communicate in a smooth and effective way.