Jacobs Douwe Egberts Research and Development (R&D) is part of the Global JDE organization. R&D is the major contributor to developing and optimizing innovative coffee and tea products to meet consumer needs in an increasingly competitive market. The focus of R&D is on building Technology Platforms (TP) for JDE’s future products and processes and delivering new product developments (NPD), product renovations and productivity initiatives. R&D have a strong involvement in the JDE business and provide valuable input to enable decisions which influence JDE’s competitive advantage. Projects are carried out cross-functionally together with Marketing, Operations and Procurement.

The Competitive Intelligence (CI) Specialist is part of the R&D organization and sits within the Strategic Innovation Team. They are one of the key knowledge holders in their field and lead projects to deliver competitive information, insights and actionable recommendations to the RD&O, Legal and Business teams to influence global strategy decisions and innovation within JDE. The specialist also leads the development of processes to improve competitor mapping and builds relationships with external suppliers in this area. 

The CI Specialist combines strong project management, research and analysis skills with a broad and deep understanding of their field of expertise, to identify, translate and deliver key competitive information, insights and recommendations. The specialist understands competitors, consumers, suppliers, markets, business, technical, environment and regulatory trends and can interpret complex data from multiple sources to identify strategic directions and influence global business strategy decisions and innovation. They successfully define, lead and drive projects in conjunction with other team members and build internal networks to collaborate on information sharing and raise awareness of CI. They also work with internal colleagues and external suppliers to ensure the right tools and processes are in place to improve CI information sharing and retrieval. Of key importance is the ability of the CI specialist to communicate in a simple, impactful but provoking manner in order to disseminate both business and technical information cross functionally to influence decision making and strategy formation.

• Experience of working in a market research / analysis position
• Experience of turning insights into action and driving tangible outcomes
• Experience building strong internal relationships in order to influence key decisions
• Strong communication skills
• Experience within a business intelligence style position would be advantageous.