Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Innovation Advisor

🎯 Role Definition

As an Innovation Advisor you will partner with executive leadership and business units to identify high-impact growth opportunities, design and run rapid experiments, and translate validated concepts into scalable products, services, or new business models. You will combine strategic insight, hands-on prototyping, and ecosystem engagement (startups, academia, partners) to reduce time-to-value and increase the ROI of the organization's innovation portfolio. This role requires strong facilitation, stakeholder management, and measurable outcomes focus: piloting minimum viable products (MVPs), building business cases, and creating roadmaps that move ideas from discovery to commercialization.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Senior Product Manager with innovation remit
Corporate Strategy Manager or Strategy Consultant focused on growth
Startup Founder / Head of Product from an accelerator or incubator

Advancement To:

Head of Innovation / Director of Innovation
VP of Corporate Development / Chief Innovation Officer (CINO)
Head of Corporate Venturing or New Business Models

Lateral Moves:

Product Strategy Lead
Corporate Venture Capital Principal
Innovation Program Director (accelerators/incubators)

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Develop and own the corporate innovation strategy and 12–36 month innovation roadmap aligned with executive priorities, market trends, and measurable KPIs (e.g., revenue from new products, time-to-market, pilot-to-scale conversion rates).
Lead discovery and opportunity-framing engagements across business units to identify unmet customer needs, white-space market opportunities, and high-value use cases for digital transformation or new services.
Design, plan, and run end-to-end innovation sprints and design thinking workshops (empathy mapping, ideation, prototyping) to rapidly generate, validate and prioritize solution concepts with customers and stakeholders.
Build rigorous, data-driven business cases and financial models for prioritized innovation initiatives, including TAM/SAM/SOM analysis, unit economics, pricing, and three-year cashflow and ROI projections.
Manage a portfolio of innovation experiments and pilots—define success criteria, structure experiments (A/B, MVPs), monitor metrics, iterate quickly, and make go/no-go recommendations to leadership.
Partner with product, engineering, and design teams to translate validated concepts into MVPs and production-ready features, providing clear requirements, success metrics, and roadmap sequencing.
Facilitate cross-functional governance forums and stage-gate reviews, ensuring clear decision points, resource allocation, and escalation of strategic bets to the executive steering committee.
Scout, evaluate, and establish partnerships with startups, incubators, accelerators, universities, and technology vendors to augment internal capabilities and accelerate time-to-market.
Lead corporate venturing activities and structured startup engagement programs—run proof-of-concepts, pilot integrations, co-development agreements, and commercial partnerships.
Create commercialization strategies for validated innovations: go-to-market plans, partner-led distribution models, licensing arrangements, or spin-out options where appropriate.
Mentor and coach internal teams on innovation methodologies (lean startup, design thinking, hypothesis-driven development) to build organizational capability and an experimentation culture.
Drive IP and commercialization assessments—work with legal to identify protectable IP, manage licensing opportunities, and advise on open vs. closed innovation choices.
Design and implement measurement frameworks and dashboards to track innovation performance (experiment velocity, conversion rates, revenue from new products, cost per validated hypothesis).
Secure and manage innovation budgets, grant funding, and external subsidies; forecast resource needs and report on spend vs. outcomes to finance and executives.
Lead change management and internal communications for innovation initiatives—create stakeholder communications, demo days, and executive briefings to build momentum and adoption.
Coordinate pilot deployments with operations, compliance, and customer success teams to ensure scalability, quality, and regulatory alignment in go-to-market pilots.
Negotiate commercial terms and manage vendor and partner contracts for technology integrations, pilot services, and co-development projects.
Conduct market and competitive intelligence, scenario planning, and trend analysis to inform strategic bets in areas such as AI/ML, IoT, blockchain, sustainability, and platform economics.
Establish and run internal innovation labs, proof-of-concept factories, or incubator programs—define intake criteria, selection process, mentorship models, and graduation pathways.
Represent the organization externally at industry events, innovation summits, and investor/partner meetings to position the company as a market innovator and to attract external collaboration.
Drive inclusion of customer and user feedback loops across the innovation lifecycle—lead user interviews, usability testing, pilot user cohorts, and NPS analysis to refine product-market fit.
Prepare executive-grade presentations, board materials, and pitch decks that synthesize market opportunity, pilot outcomes, financial impact, and recommended next steps.

Secondary Functions

Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
Maintain documentation for innovation processes, playbooks, and lessons learned to institutionalize best practices.
Coordinate cross-functional training sessions and internal workshops to raise innovation capability across the organization.
Drive vendor evaluation and procurement processes for innovation tools (design tools, rapid prototyping equipment, experimentation platforms).
Assist legal and compliance teams with pilot scope definitions to ensure regulatory readiness and privacy safeguards.
Capture and disseminate pilot learnings through post-mortems and build a centralized knowledge base for reuse across projects.
Monitor external funding, grants, and public-private partnership opportunities and support applications to secure non-dilutive funding.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Innovation Strategy Development — proven ability to design and operationalize multi-year innovation roadmaps and prioritize strategic bets.
Design Thinking & User Research — skilled at qualitative research, persona development, journey mapping, and rapid prototyping to derive human-centered solutions.
Lean Startup & Experimentation — experience structuring hypothesis-led experiments, building MVPs, and applying A/B and cohort testing methodologies.
Business Modeling & Financial Analysis — comfortable building TAM/SAM/SOM, unit economics, pricing strategy, and multi-year ROI models for new ventures.
Venture Building & Corporate Venturing — hands-on experience running incubators, accelerators, or internal venture programs, including equity & partnership structures.
Go-to-Market & Commercialization Planning — ability to design GTM strategies, sales motion alignment, channel partnerships, and launch plans for new products.
Partnership & Ecosystem Management — expertise in scouting, evaluating, negotiating, and managing startup and university partnerships.
Product Management Fundamentals — familiarity with agile product delivery, backlog prioritization, user stories, and roadmapping.
Market Intelligence & Competitive Analysis — strong market research and synthesis skills to identify trends and competitive gaps in emerging tech areas.
Measurement & Analytics — experience defining innovation KPIs, building dashboards, and analyzing pilot metrics to inform decisions (familiarity with tools like Tableau, Looker, or similar).
Intellectual Property & Commercial Agreements — working knowledge of IP evaluation, licensing, NDAs, and pilot contract structures.
Technology Literacy — strong understanding of digital technologies (AI/ML, cloud, APIs, IoT) and how they enable new business models.
Project & Portfolio Management — ability to manage multiple concurrent pilots, resource allocation, and stakeholder timelines with clarity.
Facilitation & Workshop Design — proficiency designing and facilitating large and small group workshops, hackathons, and ideation sessions.

Soft Skills

Strategic Thinking — ability to synthesize ambiguous inputs into clear strategy and prioritized action.
Executive Presence & Stakeholder Influence — proven track record presenting to and influencing senior leaders and cross-functional partners.
Leadership & Coaching — strong mentorship skills and ability to build capability and motivate cross-disciplinary teams.
Communication & Storytelling — concise, compelling written and verbal communication tailored to executives, technical teams, and external partners.
Collaboration & Relationship Building — builds trust across internal teams and external ecosystems; strong networker.
Resilience & Adaptability — comfortable navigating high ambiguity and iterating quickly when experiments fail.
Problem Solving & Critical Thinking — rigorous approach to root-cause analysis and hypothesis testing.
Facilitation & Empathy — skilled at guiding diverse groups to alignment and capturing customer insights with empathy.
Time Management & Prioritization — excels at managing competing priorities, deadlines, and limited resources.
Growth Mindset — continual learner with curiosity about emerging technologies, business models, and new ways of working.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor's degree in Business, Engineering, Design, Computer Science, Economics, or a related field.

Preferred Education:

Master's degree (MBA, MSc in Innovation, Technology Management, Design Innovation) or equivalent professional certifications (Design Thinking, Lean Startup, Product Management).

Relevant Fields of Study:

Business Administration / Strategy
Product Design / Industrial Design / UX
Engineering (Software, Systems, Industrial)
Economics / Finance
Computer Science / Data Science
Entrepreneurship / Innovation Management

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 5–12 years in innovation, corporate strategy, product management, venture building, consulting, or startup leadership with progressive responsibility.

Preferred:

8+ years delivering enterprise innovation programs or leading new business creation with demonstrable outcomes (revenue from new products, successful spin-outs, scaled pilots).
Direct experience running design sprints, managing POCs with startups, and translating pilots into scalable launches.
Track record of working with C-level stakeholders, building cross-functional teams, and managing multi-million dollar innovation portfolios or budgets.
Familiarity with accelerator/incubator operations, open innovation platforms, or corporate venture capital is a plus.