Senior Innovation Associate

About the Innovation Village

The Innovation Village is Uganda’s launchpad for leading innovators and entrepreneurs. We are building an entire ecosystem of entrepreneurs and innovators in what is growing to become a business solutions provider for our biggest challenges or opportunities. From helping entrepreneurs launch and grow high-impact ventures to attracting regional and global opportunities, our ecosystem approach converges multiple partners including public, private, academia, research, and civil society as one force for good.

Through regional spaces in the capital Kampala, Jinja to the eastern, Gulu to the northern and Mbarara to the western parts of the Uganda, Innovation Village fuels the growth of game-changing founders, startups and enterprises that can positively transform our communities and economies.

About Future Lab Studio

Future Lab Studio (“the Studio”) partners with and supports exceptional Founders and Executives solving Africa’s most pressing challenges by using technology to overcome systemic constraints. Leveraging multisectoral innovation themes cutting across various technologies, the Studio empowers innovators through a range of innovation, incubation, and acceleration journeys to build, refine or scale scalable solutions, and to access market opportunities from across our partner network, connecting the best progressing teams to stage-relevant capital from across the Studio’s capital ecosystem.

The Opportunity

At our core, the Studio convenes outstanding opportunities, tools, capital, and advice that empower Founders and Executives building and scaling category-leading tech and tech-enabled solutions to Africa’s pressing challenges.

We do this through multisectoral Innovation Clusters in areas like Automating Trust, Digital Inclusion and Climate Action where we converge Founders, Executives, Domain Experts and Investors with the passion, dedication, networks, experience and expertise in solving for the most complex challenges in these thematic areas using technology. We are especially keen on the intersection of the thematic topics with our focus on Agriculture, Education and MSME sectors.

We are looking for a world-class Senior Innovation Associate to join our Corporate Innovation & Advisory team, supporting our work with Corporates and Entrepreneur Support Organizations. Partnering with passionate business leaders and visionary entrepreneurs, you will apply creativity, strategy, design and data to re-invent businesses, drive growth and orchestrate customer-centric transformation, among others.

You will test problems, develop solutions, and test, validate and develop commercial models. Your work will include evaluating and developing strategy, rapid prototyping and experimentation, product design, product strategy, and commercialization.

You have a excellent and advanced grasp of Digital Transformation, Service and/ or Experience Design, and modern Management and Product Development concepts, and foundational knowledge of Corporate Venture Building concepts, with the ability to extract and communicate opportunities, and coach Executives and interdisciplinary teams towards sustained change. You have strong visual design and/ or prototyping skills, and an outstanding ability to communicate complex concepts easily to specialist and generalist audiences. You are an excellent collaborator, a self-starter and comfortable working with little direction or oversight and thrive in uncertainty. You have exceptional communication and interpersonal skills, both written and verbal. You are passionate about building great companies, have excellent EQ, and are a great coach.

You will work closely with the Growth Services Lead and supporting units and functions supporting organizations with digital innovation and transformation journeys as they work to become more customer-centric brands. You will identify market trends and opportunities, design new products and services, shape product and business strategy, design and build prototypes, workshop solutions with the broader Studio and Innovation Village teams as appropriate, constantly experiment with new technologies and tools to drive innovation and creativity, and present new concepts to management, clients, and other stakeholders. You support portfolio startups with integrating their solutions, as appropriate, into our Corporate Partners’ Digital Innovation and Transformation journeys. Specifically, you will:

• Advise clients on how to create better experiences for customers and partners, supporting them to make bolder choices that define their vision for the future.
• As appropriate, advise and support Clients on Growth Strategy, Innovation Strategy, Corporate Venture Building, Customer Experience Strategy, Design and Performance, Product Design, Service Design, Customer Research and Insights, Organisation Design, and so on
• Support our Startup Studio initiatives, turning ambitious ideas into suitable MVPs within 6 months guided by commercial validation, graduating the most progressed concepts into viable fully-fledged ventures within 18 months.

• Have at least 8 years of work experience, at least 3 of which are in a management role with significant responsibilities.
• Have demonstrable advanced experience in one or more of Digital Product and/or Service Design, Growth Strategy, Innovation Strategy, Corporate Venture Building, Customer Research and Insights, Organization Design, Experience Strategy, Omnichannel Experience Strategy, Digital Marketing Strategy, Digital Engagement Strategy, and/ or Digital Execution.
• Have extensive experience developing new products, services, and businesses models, more so in those in technology or that are technology-enabled.
• Experience founding or being an early operator of a high-growth startup that successfully closed funding is an added advantage.
• Have considerable Project or Program Management experience.
• Experience designing and managing Innovation Programs or leading Innovation Departments an added advantage.
• Experience with Enterprise Technology like HubSpot, Salesforce, Adobe, Google, SharePoint, Microsoft 365, Impartner, etc. an added advantage.
• Outstanding research skills and the ability to integrate multiple data sources to inform complex problems.
• Proven track record of taking ideas and bringing them to life across a range of industries.
• Have a deep understanding of what makes an outstanding product, startup and founder.
• Have a deep understanding of how to commercialize opportunities.
• Have basic proficiency in low code/ no-code tools, and in building prototypes.
• Experience leading or significantly contributing to generating P/L an added advantage.
• Be able to identify opportunities by looking at user needs and broader market trends.
• Have a sense of how to identify key risks and validate hypotheses.
• Have exceptional communication and interpersonal skills, both written and verbal.
• Have worked with a variety of products and industries in your career.
• Be organized, attentive to detail and an ability to balance detail with the big picture.
• Exceptional ability to communicate complex ideas effectively.

Why You Might Be Excited About Us

• The platform to influence the creation and delivery of ground-breaking innovations with the ability to create better outcomes for millions of Ugandans and beyond
• The opportunity to collaborate with exceptional Executives to transform a diverse range of organizations across multiple sectors
• Opportunity to impact the direction and success of Future Lab Studio, and by extension, The Innovation Village