Now Hiring! Open Innovation Managers at Hershey and Intuit
I got curious when Hershey announced a newly created role in which this new hire should assist the senior manager, open innovation in establishing and optimizing The Hershey Company’s open innovation Program.
What kind of responsibilities comes with such a job? What are the required qualifications? Those were among the questions prompted by my curiosity and besides the Hershey posting (dated Dec 19), I also looked at a similar job posting from Intuit (dated Dec 23) to get some answers.
Here are some snippets from the two postings:
40% of the Hershey job responsibility is about assisting the facilitation of executive, business and technical leaders in ongoing development of open innovation as an efficient and effective organizational capability.
Another 15% includes specifying and administering the operation of open innovation specific IT and related support systems, such as portals for ideation, process workflow, external scouting and submission of proposals from the outside.
And yet another 15% is about facilitating innovation project leaders in operating the open innovation process for assigned projects.
I like this as I firmly believe the future role for innovation leaders will evolve around facilitation and integration internally as well as externally.
Hershey had a keen eye on candidates with 2-3 years of recent client project consulting experience in a well known consulting firm, assigned to open innovation projects and/or hands-on client-based experience of facilitating an open innovation process preferably in food or related industry.
As highly desired capabilities, they also looked for the ability to effectively interact across business and technical functions at various levels of seniority throughout the company, technical knowledge of open innovation best practices and the ability to build relationships internally and externally and the ability to interact with senior executives.
Hershey also stated that academic specialization in open innovation could be an advantage. Could this be due to the lack of seasoned practitioners?
Intuit sees open innovation as their next frontier for growth and they searched for a technologist to lead and manage their open innovation initiatives.
The responsibilities include driving internal awareness, understanding and adoption of open innovation across Intuit. This makes a lot of sense as you need to win over employees in order to defeat the not-invented-here antibodies that exist in most companies.
Other key responsibilities include nurturing external relations with several categories of innovation partners and planning and leading directed and undirected open innovation efforts that could include crowd-sourcing with customers, entrepreneur community events and exploration with technology and academic communities in order to identify new, leading edge technologies.
The list also includes partnering with the business units to develop a “shopping list” of business and technology solutions.
On qualifications, Intuit paid attention to technical academic education and strong experience in open innovation, either as a practitioner at a company introducing open innovation or as a consultant or in another role, helping multiple companies adopt open innovation.
It seems as if having a few years of open innovation experience is a great way to land interesting jobs in the near future as the supply – in my opinion – will have a hard time meeting the demand.
Intuit – of course – also expect the successful candidate to be able to effectively manage relationships (up, down, across) and as with Hershey there is quite some focus on being able to create outcomes for all stakeholders (external partners, employees, customers, shareholders) by connecting all aspects of the business to make innovations, businesses, and customers successful.
Hopefully, this summary gives you an idea of what it takes to work with open innovation at large, multinational companies.
You can check out the job postings to learn more and please also share your insights and experiences on job profiles for open innovation managers with our community.
Hershey: Open Innovation, Associate Manager
Intuit: Open Innovation Manager
Stefan-
I often track these (infrequent) job postings to see what companies (clients and prospects) are up to and how they define their OI roles, but I like your analysis of what these job postings say about the role of an OI manager and the required skills to be successful. However, I'd slightly disagree with your comment that the demand will outstrip supply. In my experience, except for a (very few) exec/VP or director-level jobs, I've seen very little movement for companies to hire OI staff from externally. At first glance this would seem to contradict the spirit of OI, but when you consider that a key element of a good OI manager/champion is to really understand their organization, IP requirements, and how much the organization can stretch, it's no wonder that these are almost 99% filled internally. Quite often, it is really just formalizing or redefining an OI role that someone has been playing already. I think this will be a common trend for at least a few years, although since employees seldom have the right combination of technical, management, and facilitation skills, the need for additional training and coaching will only increase. This has become a key element of what we see clients needing when they want to jump in and do OI in a big way.
Recently, a friend commented that I must have gotten a lot of job inquiries from clients (this is my 10th year practicing OI after all), and he was quite surprised that this has never come up!
-Kevin Stark
Stefan,
It seems that OI is on the verge of becoming a discipline that will find its way in many forms and in different types of organization. This is really interesting and helpful for potential leaders to look at OI as a discipline and not just another «innovation buzz». A lot as still to be shared about OI in practice. These postings confirm that leaders are moving forward with OI and this is a great opportunity to follow how it will impact their business strategies and progress.
Thanks for sharing!!
@Kevin, I appreciate your comment and especially your disagreement
I see your point that companies do not hire that many external people.
However, the same companies might have trouble finding the "right" guys internally and thus we could still end up having the supply/demand issue.
Stefan, Thank you for writing about these posting!! I found it most informative.
I do want to clarify that Intuit will be hiring externally for this role. Feel free to contact me directly with any questions regarding this position.
Nick Mailey l Talent Acquisition Manager l Intuit
650.944.2583 p
650.224.0432 c http://www.intuit.com/careers http://www.intuit.com/WeGetIt
Voted by FORTUNE© Magazine as Most Admired Software Company and a top 100 company to work for!
@ Kevin Something tells me that very soon your phone will not stop ringing!!