Innovation Lead

The Role's Purpose The Innovation Programme Lead will work collaboratively with the Innovation Services team to design, curate and deliver high impact innovation programmes that provide startup innovators with access to world-class insight and expertise. The role is busy, fast-paced, complex, and will require a highly- organised approach to manage the multiple tasks simultaneously.

What You'll Do

• Designing and delivering innovation programmes, such as startup accelerators, bootcamps, hackathons
• Facilitating innovation workshops
• Managing the team (virtually and in-person) delivering the programmes
• Providing business support and mentoring entrepreneurs
• Engaging and managing senior stakeholders (clients, delivery partners)
• Managing programme schedules and deliveries to agreed workplan
• Managing financials to meet or beat budget performance
• Focus on ensuring high-quality standards of delivery to delight customers and partners
• Identifying new ideas and themes from market intelligence and developing potential follow-on or new innovation programmes
• Coordinating regional activation activity, including events, roundtables, employer engagement sessions, insight gathering, referral pathways and partnership development.
• Translating local ecosystem intelligence into programme design, delivery decisions and continuous improvement, ensuring national programmes are adapted appropriately to regional strengths and sector clusters. Due to the nature of this position, our work, and our client engagements, you must be willing and eligible to achieve a minimum of SC clearance. To qualify for SC clearance, you must be a British Citizen or have resided in the UK for the last 5 years with no extensive periods outside of the UK. Pre-existing SC welcome. For more information about clearance eligibility, please see https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/united-kingdom-security-vetting

Your Skills

• A deep understanding of product development processes, commercialisation, startup growth strategies and technology incubation
• Excellent communication skills, including excellent workshop facilitation skills
• Problem solving skills that can quickly identify issues and find solutions, often in high-pressure situations
• Able to be flexible and open to change of direction and thinking on your feet effectively
• Advanced knowledge of Excel, PowerPoint and Word
• Relationship building skills, with the ability to build and engage networks to deliver business outcomes
• Skilled in identifying emerging themes and working to create market facing solutions to meet the demands

Your Experience

• Proven experience working with or in a technology, innovation, venture or startup environment
• Previous experience of mentoring startups and innovators
• Programme management expertise , with solid organisational skills and a structured approach to delivery
• Experience of managing programme budgets, suppliers and other third-party relationships
• Experience with managing complex relationships and stakeholders

Why us? As a start-up, we thrive in a dynamic and fast-paced work environment dedicated to empowering innovators. We embrace individuals who leverage technology and creativity to tackle our greatest challenges head-on. We strongly advocate for maintaining a harmonious work-life balance, our goal is to ensure every member of our team can authentically be themselves and live their best lives. We firmly believe that innovation and creativity flourish when we cultivate a diverse workforce, comprising highly skilled individuals with a wide range of perspectives to contribute. In return we will offer you:

• Salary: £65,000 - £80,000 depending on skills and experience
• Annual bonus scheme
• A generous pension scheme (with a company contribution of up to 10%)
• Private healthcare, life assurance and critical illness cover
• 25 days holiday plus bank holidays
• Volunteering day Plexal is an equal opportunities employer and we actively encourage applicants from individuals from all backgrounds. We are a Disability Committed employer and are willing to make reasonable adjustments throughout the recruitment process.