Manager, Innovation Lab at African Entrepreneur Collective (AEC)

About the Opportunity

This is a new position for Inkomoko, with great opportunity to leverage innovation to improve how we do business and bring locally-relevant solutions to help our clients start, optimize, and grow their micro/small businesses. As a member of the Innovation Lab team, the successful candidate will be expected to collaborate closely with the Regional Director of Innovation and different business units across the organization to turn insights and ideas into potential solutions. 

Responsibilities

Key responsibilities include:

• Product/service development: Co-design with Inkomoko teams, including IT team (and vendors when appropriate) small-scale experiments for revising our programs or services, testing prototypes internally or with clients, and evaluating the impact. 
• Own Innovation Development Processes: Develop and implement intuitive processes and systems to generate, organize and fully implement continual improvements that add value to Inkomoko’s business strategy.  This includes both client entrepreneur-facing improvements and internal improvements for colleagues across East Africa.
• Innovation Program management: Manage day-to-day innovation portfolio, overseeing the planning, tracking progress, and communicating results of Inkomoko’s innovation projects and programs.
• Goal setting: Develop innovation targets and KPIs to track and measure the effectiveness of Inkomoko’s innovation practices , ensuring the results are practical, tangible and meaningful to generate efficiency and social impact. 
• Create a Culture of Innovation: Engage across the company to help Inkomoko to socialize innovation practices through informal (office hour, guest speaker, etc.) and formal learnings (hackathon, workshop, etc.).  Engage colleagues in a range of skill levels, languages, lived experiences, and exposure levels to generating improvements.

Minimum Qualifications

• A creative problem solver with strong user (UI/UX) experience
• At least 5 years of innovation management experience, including hands-on experience molding ideas into real life solutions
• A highly empathetic community builder and/or HCDer who has experience working with marginalized communities in East Africa (e.g. refugees, women, youth) to implement and scale practical solutions.
• A highly effective communicator who can engage data and storytelling to build consensus across cross-functional team environments and from different cultures.
• A thoughtful person – brave enough to try doing things differently and adaptive enough to manage roadblocks.
• Willingness to fail - not all ideas will work.  This position will need to be willing to pivot, iterate, and let go when needed.  Be committed to solving the problem, not wedded to the solution.