Associate Director – Innovation

• Shape and advance an assigned innovation landscape or focus area
• Translate strategic priorities into discovery themes, opportunity spaces, and learning objectives
• Own and prioritize a portfolio of discovery and validation activities
• Lead identification, framing, prioritization, experimentation, and validation of potential opportunities
• Guide portfolio trade-offs and recommend whether opportunities should be explored, validated, paused, pivoted, or stopped
• Maintain opportunity framing and value propositions from exploration through concept validation
• Oversee discovery quality, opportunity shaping, experimentation, concept testing, and evidence synthesis
• Define validation outcomes and decision criteria
• Partner with business, digital, data, science, technology, and subject-matter stakeholders
• Contribute to governance and portfolio reviews and represent the team in leadership forums
• Escalate decisions, risks, dependencies, and resource constraints
• Lead, develop, and coach team members
• Set direction across multiple opportunities and team members
• Allocate resources and leadership attention across the portfolio
• Build team capability in discovery methods, experimentation, evidence quality, stakeholder management, and decision discipline
• Support succession, development, and workforce planning

• Bachelor’s degree in business, science, technology, engineering, or a related field
• 8–10 years of comparable experience leading innovation, strategy, discovery, research, or consulting roles within a complex global organization
• Experience owning and prioritizing a portfolio of discovery, experimentation, or concept-validation activities
• Ability to translate strategic priorities into focused opportunity spaces, learning agendas, and evidence-based recommendations
• Experience leading teams and developing capability across multiple levels
• Strong analytical, strategic, and systems-thinking capabilities
• Executive-level stakeholder engagement, influencing, and decision-support skills
• Experience progressing opportunities from early exploration through structured concept validation and decision readiness
• Appropriate education, training, and/or directly related experience may be considered as an equivalency
• Clinical research or pharmaceutical industry experience preferred
• Familiarity with experimentation, hypothesis-driven innovation, customer or user research, concept testing, and evidence-based portfolio decisions
• Experience working across multiple markets, business units, or geographies
• Awareness of emerging technologies, industry trends, evolving customer needs, and new business models
• Ability to communicate, receive, and understand information and ideas with diverse groups of people
• Ability to work upright and stationary for typical working hours
• Ability to use and learn standard office equipment and technology proficiently
• Ability to perform successfully under pressure while prioritizing and handling multiple projects or activities
• Must be legally authorized to work in the country of residence without sponsorship
• Must be able to pass a comprehensive background check

• Fully remote work arrangement
• As-needed domestic and international travel (0–20%)
• Relocation assistance is not provided