Innovation Lead in London

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 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
• 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.

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.

About us

Plexal is the innovation and growth company helping to strengthen the UK’s technology capabilities through collaboration. With teams in London, Manchester and Cheltenham, we work closely with government, industry, startups and academia to drive economic growth and reinforce national security. Founded by Delancey in 2017, Plexal delivers four core services: creating workspaces for innovators, running innovation programmes and consultancy, building regional tech clusters and helping SMEs scale strategically. By closing the gap between early-stage and established organisations – across the public and private sectors at home and abroad – we’ve impacted over 1,200 businesses, added £731m to the UK economy and helped create 9,400 jobs. Headquartered at Here East on the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, Plexal partners with organisations including the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, the National Cyber Security Centre, Airbus, Amazon, Barclays Eagle Labs, Google Cloud, TfL, The Alan Turing Institute and the University of Oxford.