This job has expired, please see additional jobs below
Innovation Design Director
Grant Thornton
Chicago, IL, United States
Job Details - this job has expired, please see similar jobs below
Description
Grant Thornton is a collaborative, entrepreneurial firm on the move! As part of a dynamic, global organization of more than 42,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries, we have the agility and focus it takes to be a leader.
JOB DESCRIPTION:
We are looking for a forward-thinking Innovation Design Director to lead the Innovation Design Teamat Grant Thornton. In this critical leadership role, you will lead and manage a team of Innovation Managers. You will be accountable for establishing, executing, and continuously improving the lifecycle of innovation activities required to help the business recast challenges as opportunities, and ideate, design, prototype, measure, pivot, select, and deliver innovation initiatives.
Working with a variety of internal and external stakeholders, business units, clients, ecosystem partners, and projects, you and your team will conduct and lead discovery and design interviews, workshops, exercises, and initiatives. Through these efforts, you will produce innovative products and solutions that deliver operational efficiencies and/or can be taken to market as project accelerators or new business model offerings.
RESPONSIBILITIES:
You will provide guidance to Innovation Managers and work directly with the Firm’s service lines and market teams to understand client problems and opportunities, and provide diverse, creative, and disruptive external industry perspectives. You will generate user-centered insights, and facilitate the identification, development, build/prototyping, and agile delivery of innovative solutions. Through these efforts you will create innovative products and assets that drive client value and firm-wide revenue, quality improvement, and market growth.
You will help Innovation Managers build rapport, collaborate, and partner with Innovation Owners within the Firm’s Tax, Audit, and Advisory service line and market teams. You will guide Innovation Manager efforts to work with the business to (1) identify client and market challenges; (2) define innovation opportunities; (3) launch ideation campaigns using the Firm’s ideation platform; (4) develop innovation business cases; (5) execute innovation solution experiments; (6) use client feedback to pivot, improve, and validate innovations; (7) define innovation features and groom user story backlogs; (8) plan and manage innovation development, delivery and deployment; (9) ensure innovation quality; and (10) measure innovation benefits and business case realization.
You will help define, improve, and ensure that the Firm’s Innovation Process and leading practices are followed to create quality outcomes. This involves working with Innovation Team emerging technology SMEs, collaborating with the Firm’s ecosystem of third-party providers and go-to-market team, and using Design Thinking tactics and tools to discover and design innovation opportunities.
You will work closely with Innovation Team leaders to continually improve the Firm’s innovation delivery capabilities. To this end, you will help develop training, recruiting, and staffing programs, and participate in innovation planning, budgeting, and business development activities.
Maintain a good working relationship with teammates, clients and works effectively with client management and staff at all levels to gather information and perform services.
Key Innovation Design Director tasks include:
• Schedule and facilitate discovery and design workshops
• Inventory in-flight innovations
• Prioritize in-flight innovations
• Launch innovation campaigns
• Identify new innovation ideas
• Evaluate innovation ideas
• Prioritize and down select ideas
• Assign idea owner(s)
• Prepare shark tank pitches
• Conduct shark tanks
• Identify innovation members
• Help Secure innovation funding
• Recruit and hire team members
• Stand-up innovation teams
• Identify viable commercial solutions
• Select technical architecture(s)
• Develop innovation visions
• Lead user-centered design efforts
• Produce Design Thinking artifacts
• Develop and refine prototypes
• Conduct prototyping workshops
• Present prototypes to end-users
• Use feedback to pivot/refine ideas
• Elaborate epic and features
• Ensure epics and features are understood
• Estimate innovation costs
• Estimate innovation benefits
• Secure benefits realization commitments
• Compile and refine business cases
• Present business cases to investment steering committee
• Secure innovation funding
• Help lead Release Planning Workshops
• Serve as Product Manager during Agile delivery
• Ensure Innovations are delivered and deployed in timely, cost effective manner
• Measure and report on realization of innovation business case benefits
Qualifications
SKILLS AND QUALIFICATIONS:
What we are looking for in you includes:
• 15+ years of related work experience in a similar consulting practice or function, servicing cross-industry clients at a national level.
• Strong business acumen and domain expertise
• Ability to think strategically and possess divergent thinking. Brings updated thinking to solve traditional challenges.
• Proven ability to prioritize and drive solution-centric efforts across a geographically distributed team of business and technology professionals
• Prior experience in leading and managing a team
• Bias towards results, with sound judgment and pragmatism
• Strong background/experience with the utilization of digital, cloud-based emerging technologies and data analytics to drive innovation and client service
• Ability to be a high-impact player on multiple engagements
• Outstanding communication skills and the ability to integrate with client facing teams to support and enable successful delivery or engagements
• Must have excellent oral and written communication skills - Ability to communicate difficult subject matter in a clear and concise fashion.
• Ability to effectively execute job duties in a collaborative manner and with sound judgement, pragmatism, and a bias toward results.
Some intangibles we're looking for in you:
• You have experience with workshop facilitation across a variety of industries
• You are intellectually curious and prefer to work in collaborative teams
• You have a willingness and desire to put the client first
• You have a bias toward action, you try things, and sometimes you fail
Up to 50% Travel required.
BENEFITS:
Grant Thornton LLP promotes a nationally recognized culture of health and offers an extensive array of benefits to meet individual lifestyles. For a complete list of benefits please visit http://www.gt.com/.
GRANT THORNTON:
Founded in Chicago in 1924, Grant Thornton LLP (Grant Thornton) is the U.S. member firm of Grant Thornton International Ltd, one of the world’s leading organizations of independent audit, tax and advisory firms. Grant Thornton has revenue in excess of $1.56 billion and operates 58 offices across the United States with more than 565 partners and 8,000+ employees
Grant Thornton works with a broad range of publicly and privately held companies, government agencies, financial institutions, and civic and religious organizations. Core industries served include consumer and industrial products, financial services, not-for-profit, private equity, and technology. Grant Thornton focuses on serving dynamic organizations that pursue growth holistically — whether through revenue improvement, leadership, mission fulfillment or innovation.
It is Grant Thornton’s policy to promote equal employment opportunities. All personnel decisions, including, but not limited to, recruiting, hiring, training, promotion, compensation, benefits and termination, are made without regard to race, creed, color, religion, national origin, sex, age, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, citizenship status, veteran status, disability or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state or local law.