SGS is the world’s leading inspection, verification, testing and certification company. SGS is recognized as the global benchmark for quality and integrity. With more than 93,000 employees, SGS operates a network of over 2,400 offices and laboratories around the world. Our Corporate Incubation Lab acts as a catalyst to stimulate innovation and develop a pipeline of successful new ventures within SGS. It provides SGS-built early-stage ventures with the support and guidance they need to develop into a new business.

You will nurture and coach disruptive business ideas and drive them from discovery to scale.  As Innovation Coach you will play an essential role for innovation teams and will impact business outcomes on a global level.

More specifically, you will:

• Coach innovation teams within the SGS group through the successive stages of innovation – from exploration to scale, as well as through pivots and invalidations;
• Nurture disruptive ideas with the aim of helping teams validate a repeatable business model;
• Help teams define hypotheses, create experiments and analyse results, in partnership with SGS business units and regions. You can push back if an idea is unrealistic, or promote its further development;
• Encourage the exploration of new research directions and help SGS-backed start-ups to commercialize their expertise and know-how;
• Build solid strategies and execute through a systematic framework while managing change,
• Help to bring together teams of external experts and internal intrapreneurs that will drive forward the development of start-ups;
• Ensure internal innovation teams follow pre-defined metrics relating to customer desirability, feasibility, financial viability and alignment to the strategy of SGS;
• Continuously challenge and help refine the processes and structures of innovation within SGS based on empirical evidence;
• Lead by example but also provide insights to enable collaborative decision making around innovation portfolio decisions.

• Educated to degree level;
• Proven background of building and running your own start-up(s) – ideally in a B2B context. You have an entrepreneurial mindset and will have learnt from your successes and failures;
• Proven leadership skills with the ability to lead, guide and influence C and E-level stakeholders. You can work well under pressure and you are able to challenge the status quo;
• Excellent knowledge of and tangible experience in the following methodologies: lean start-up, design thinking, business model design, agile MVP development;
• Very familiar with early-stage innovation tools (Value Proposition Canvas, Business Model Canvas etc) and able to coach teams to use them to validate their ideas;
• Familiar with current tech trends and their impact on the business world, innovation accounting, OKRs and KPIs;
• Fluent in English; other languages are a plus (French, Portuguese, Spanish in particular).

We would like to hear from candidates based in the following locations: Spain, UK and Ireland, Belgium, Netherlands and Germany. Remote and flexible working are available.