Vice President - Innovation - eCommerce

EXPECTATIONS FROM THE ROLE :

New Initiatives and Incubation Planning for Innovations :

- Support businesses to spot & aggregate trends in their own, adjacent and related industries. Proactively facilitate identification of opportunities across businesses for the next 2-5 years

- Jointly own the innovation portfolio; Make detailed implementation plan and ensure that they are dovetailed with annual plans.

- Establish clear and significant (industry standard) contribution of innovation projects in long-term and medium-term strategic plan.

- Engage Leadership and Board on Innovation.

- Incubate - homeless ideas- that are either too risky for the business units, or are outside the existing business boundaries, and hence might not otherwise get funded

Culture and ecosystem for innovation :
 
- Ensure deployment of efforts (quality and quantity) to progress projects listed in innovation portfolio

- Analyze (and compare) the Innovation performance of the company, business units, functions and facilitate improvements

- Ensure that novelty degradation doesn't creep in for completed innovations to avoid diminished returns.

- Facilitate Open Innovation - interface with the external entities: start-ups (for investment and for providing use cases), universities and create enabling internal business models.

- Inspire and enable employees for innovation and build the culture: Capability building initiatives, Rewards & recognition, mindset for Crowd-sourcing, Create friction-less processes for idea-generation to implementation.

What will it take?

- Formulates effective new ideas and innovative strategies for product development, marketing, branding, or business opportunities.

- Recognizes promising ideas and finds ways to introduce them into the company's future plans and discards ideas that are ineffective, costly, or beyond the scope of the company's mission or abilities to develop.

- Encourages creative thinking in employees and finds ways to nurture innovative thinking across all areas of the company.

- Follows customer responses to new ideas, tracks and analyzes the success of new products or services, and responds to customer questions or concerns.

- Monitors research and development of other organizations to spot trends in innovation and supplement research findings in the company's industry.

- Evaluates the progress of innovation and adjusts the pace or direction of new projects in accordance.

- Keeps all new projects in line with the company's mission and maintains consistency with the company's message and brand.

- A great two-way communicator, able to listen and distill knowledge to the internal and external stakeholders.

- A robust network of contacts to bring in new deals and expedite current projects.

- Must be able to work creatively within a budget and use innovation to find ways of more effectively managing resources.

- Proven ability to follow through on complex projects from idea to implementation. Ability to operate independently with excellent time management skills and confirmed ability to deliver on multiple, competing priorities in a dynamic environment.

- All in all everything that would be expected from a 0 to 1 entrepreneur- a lot of hustling, hacking, running around and making team run around, and juggle multiple moving parts all at once- a process oriented approach to give method to the madness will be prime for successful execution of the roles & responsibilities.