Innovation Lead BongoHive Consult

Start Date: TBD

Reporting to: Director, Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Works closely with: In this role, you will work closely with our Project Lead, Product Lead, and Entrepreneurship Lead, to support our clients in building products and services their customers love.

Hours: Full-time

Duration: 24 months (Renewable Contract)

Location: Lusaka (Primary); Hybrid/Remote

About the Innovation Unit

The innovation unit helps organisations build products and services their customers love.

We use strategy, creativity, sector and business insights, and technology; bringing our vast experience supporting high-growth ventures to co-create what’s next.

Description

The Innovation Lead facilitates internal and external innovation; and creates incremental and/or disruptive, growth-enabling products and services to enter the Zambian and regional markets.

You will lead and scale BongoHive Consult’s strategic innovation service, leveraging Human Centred Design, UX, Agile and Lean Methodologies. You are an empathic change leader, with a demonstrated ability to build a solid team, process, and products/services to effectively establish BongoHive Consult as the agency to turn to for any innovation work in Zambia and beyond.

This position is built around a team of unconventional people who explore and create exciting concepts through an early-stage to growth-stage development process.

Duties and Responsibilities

Internal Innovation Management

• Create the strategy and culture required for employees to experiment; with the right resources at the right level to support that experimentation.
• Develop an internal Innovation Strategy in collaboration with Directors and Leads. Specifically, this involves an analysis of the opportunities, risks, strengths, and weaknesses, as well as the derivation of important issues of the future and the purpose and vision of what the organisation wants to achieve with innovation.
• Oversee research into future trends and their impact on the company.
• Oversee design, development, analysis, and suggest new marketing concepts as well as strategies.
  Lead and direct different cross-functional programs and projects of varied sizes and types concurrently.
• Contribute and influence the strategic direction for senior leadership using informal and formal communication.

External Innovation Management

• Manage engagements with new clients seeking to develop new innovative products leading to client acquisition
• Manage and attain customer expectations and ensure delivery fulfils expectations.
• Support BongoHive Consult clients in creating strategy and culture required for employees to experiment with the right resources at the right level to support that experimentation.
• Support Consult partners to scout for ideas by opening up the process to the outside world and searching for ideas and new technologies outside the company in the sense of open innovation.

Key Accountabilities:

• Recognize and stimulate unusual ideas with high potential impact.
• Use personal networks to link ideas and people that might not otherwise interact.
• Apply unique skills and interests to develop new opportunity domains.
• Ask tough and insightful questions.
• Provide constructive coaching and advice to innovation projects.
• Drive innovation projects through to completion.
• Ensure to exercise decision-making and independent judgement while being aligned with customers and management.

Expectations

• Ability to navigate through an area for which there is not yet a map (requires curiosity to pursue the interesting without getting distracted by the unimportant).
• Capable of fostering individual and collective creativity.
• Able to create processes and procedures for ideation, prototyping, and production.
• Able to balance risks against the potential rewards of the teams’ work, based on organisational tolerance for risk and organisational objectives, as well as other factors.
• Comfortable with ambiguity and thrive on change.
• Must collaborate with Consult Tech to create new technology and optimization opportunities, new directions for the enterprise, and positive futures for the ecosystem.
• High Emotional Intelligence. Specifically, empathy and active listening, the capacity to understand what others are feeling and thinking and engage them the right way.
• Active online presence and familiarity with social media (Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.)
• This position requires flexible hours of work which might include working long hours and weekends.
• Have a willingness to learn. Share feedback, get feedback, and operate in a culture of being open-minded to grow.
• Ability to overcome critique.

Requirements:

• Candidates must have experience building/helping build something from scratch and scaling it.
• Proven experience in helping other people turn their ideas into reality; work with multiple fluid team structures that require trust and integrity.
• Candidates must have previously held a leadership position(s).
• Candidates must have proven project management experience.
• Proven experience in the ability to understand wide-ranging, out-of-the-ordinary, technical, and business proposals in depth.
• Experience in organising and facilitating brainstorming workshops to bring new ideas to fruition.
• Experience in showing commercial sense, contract structuring and negotiation, and business strategy development.
• A proven understanding of Innovation methods and creativity.
• A deep insight into business and technology in different industries and disciplines
• Positive, enthusiastic, and able to adapt to fast-changing situations.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, and interpersonal skills.
• Social media proficiency – overall engagement.
• Assertive and have a strong drive to develop those around you.

Experience

• Master’s degree or equivalent in business, computer science, innovation, entrepreneurship, strategy, or related fields.
• 3+ years of relevant project management, business, or, product development, digital transformation experience.
• Passion for and understanding of entrepreneurial communities.
• Experience working in a dynamic environment.
• Experience using varied problem-solving methodologies (preferred).
• Knowledgeable of EPIC communication techniques (nice to have).