Senior Adviser Innovation (P-5), Office of Innovation, Stockholm, Sweden #131430 (Temporary Appointment) (6 months)

UNICEF works in over 190 countries and territories to save children’s lives, defend their rights, and help them fulfill their potential, from early childhood through adolescence.

At UNICEF, we are committed, passionate, and proud of what we do. Promoting the rights of every child is not just a job – it is a calling.

UNICEF is a place where careers are built, we offer our staff diverse opportunities for personal and professional development that will help them develop a fulfilling career while delivering on a rewarding mission. We pride ourselves on a culture that helps staff thrive, coupled with an attractive compensation and benefits package.

Visit our website to learn more about what we do at UNICEF.

For every child, success

The Office of Innovation (OoI) works to catalyze UNICEF's and all its partners’ expertise and resources against key children-outcomes bottlenecks to continuously ideate and scale the most effective solutions with transformational potential at scale to achieve the child-related SDGs. 

The office is doing this by continuously exploring new ways of accelerating results for children, investing across a range of early-stage solutions, harnessing internal and external expertise towards continuously iterating and finetuning the most promising solutions for children through a systematic portfolio management approach, and leveraging all stakeholders’ innovation energy, knowhow and resources from intergovernmental, multilateral, private sector and non-governmental fora.

How can you make a difference? 

The Senior Adviser (Portfolio, Culture and Scale) is the Office of Innovation Lead for global approaches to innovation, world-class practice and performance management for innovation governance, UNICEF priorities for innovation, the innovation pipeline, and principles, standards and performance across Innovation. S/he takes actions to nurture and strengthen a culture of innovation across UNICEF, and especially to build the capacities across staff and partners to innovate more effectively and widely with and for children. The role of temporary assignment is cover for the medium-term absence of the incumbent Senior Advisor.

Under the guidance of the Director and in close collaboration with Office of Innovation hubs and teams the staff is responsible for:

• Setting UNICEF’s global standards and oversight on how to build, source, curate, invest in and successfully scale up smart, world class portfolios of innovation solutions and act as custodian of the innovation pipeline and its phases.
• Responsible for overall global innovation governance and its mechanisms. 
• Performance management including creation, refinement, monitoring, corrective action, and reporting for portfolio-related KPIs from the UNICEF global strategic plan (H6.1), to OOI OMP PCS, innovation Hub and portfolios. 
• Design, implement and iterate mechanisms of collaboration, convergence, coordination and rapid sharing and learning across Global Innovation Hubs and Portfolios to avoid fragmentation and silos.
• Provide thought leadership on the above aspects of innovation practice. 
• Business owner and steward of innovation knowledge management platforms. 
• Manage evidence generation and relevant frameworks for portfolio management at country, regional and global levels. 
• Build UNICEF’s culture and organizational capacity to innovate and to adapt, absorb and scale new innovations.

If you would like to know more about this position, please review the complete Job Description here:  JD Senior Adviser Innovation PCS_ P5_TA_ 6 months contract.pdf

To qualify as an advocate for every child you will have…

Minimum requirements:

Education:

An advanced university degree (master’s or higher) in Social Sciences, Humanities, International Relations, Economics, Business or another relevant field. Experience in innovation strategy or related disciplines preferred.

Work Experience: 

• A minimum of 10 years of professional work