Innovation Strategy Lead at International Rescue Committee

• The Innovation Strategy Lead will help Airbel teams develop strategies to take projects from idea to scale. The role will lead teams to define a vision, build a strategic roadmap, and develop an operational plan. The Innovatoin Strategy Lead will also play an essential role in developing quantitative modeling to drive critical decisions across the Airbel team.

Key Responsibilities:

Work with Global Research and Innovation Priorities (GRIPs) within Airbel to create and drive their strategic roadmaps and operational plans.

• Drive strategy and strong execution for teams, in line with their strategic roadmaps so that they can collectively make rapid progress against an ambitious vision. Work in this area will entail deep analysis of key challenges, quantitative problem sizing, client segmentation, pathways to scale, and assessments/mitigation of key risks.
• Develop operational plans that include budget, hiring, and timelines to structure team’s activities in accordance to strategy.
• Develop effective and efficient processes to bring together key decision-makers and stakeholders and align them towards driving forward key actions and decisions.
• Guide teams on pivoting and adjusting strategy as needed; work with team leads to continually assess the strategy against team opportunities, constraints, challenges, and external environment.
• Articulate clear funding needs based on what is needed to implement strategic roadmaps; draft fundraising proposals when relevant, in collaboration with colleagues

Grow our team’s use of data-driven, quantitative modeling to drive critical decisions at Airbel and through the broader IRC.

• Develop a consistent, repeatable approach to quantitative modeling to improve our ability to estimate size of client need across countries and programming areas. Work in partnership with country teams to project potential impact and scale for key interventions or opportunity areas.
• Create an approach to visualizing data and insights from quantitative models that allow teams to understand implications of the model developed and make effective and efficient decisions on pathways to pursue.
• Lead the operationalization of this new vision for how we can better leverage quantitative models to size client needs and respond accordingly; this entails working with many stakeholders, iterating on approach, and working rapidly to put feedback into action.

Provide strategy support to projects designing, testing and scaling new innovations across Airbel.

• Support teams to effectively frame problems and possible solutions, to size and segment markets, to generate data-backed hypotheses, create project plans to execute, and analyze data from prototypes and pilots.
• This role is a great fit for someone who likes developing new approaches to complex problems, who loves iterating ideas with colleagues, and can jump between high-level strategy and the details of operationalizing.

Job Requirements

Education and Work Experience:

• Bachelor’s degree in a related field or equivalent professional experience.
• 5-8 years of experience in conducting strategic planning, leading on qualitative and quantitative analysis to define strategic pathways, and operationalizing plans.

Demonstrated Skills and Competencies:

• Demonstrated experience generating data-driven models to make strategic decisions.
• Ability to solve complex-problems, bring together quantitative modeling and qualitative analysis, and distill data into actionable insights.
• Able to engage and align an interdisciplinary team, communicate with senior leaders, and facilitate a group to make effective decisions.
• Ability to work well in a distributed, multicultural, fast paced environment.
• Familiarity with quantitative and qualitative research methodologies applied in medicine and social science.
• Experience in humanitarian setting or development contexts and/or an international NGO.

Preferred Requirements:

• Experience driving strategy at either a top tier strategy consulting firm, in the strategy development function of a global organization, or in a strategy role at a startup.
• Fluency in French and/or Arabic.

Working Environment

• Standard work office environment
• Up to 25% travel possible