Sr. Manager, Innovation & Strategy

 

Nestlé’s Research & Development Center is our regional powerhouse driving innovation in food, beverage, and pharmaceutical science. Backed by our global Nestlé R&D organization, we lead breakthrough discoveries that are both good for consumers and the planet. Our team of experts range from product developers to engineers, working across our portfolio of food, beverage, infant nutrition, and health science to create leading-edge products and services. As part of our organization, you will use your entrepreneurial spirit and commitment to excellence to unlock the power of food and provide premium value.   

 

This position is not eligible for Visa Sponsorship.

 

Nestlé Development Center Marysville is one of the longest-standing R&D centers in Nestlé's worldwide network. Here, we are the home of great coffee innovation - we provide technical development expertise for beverage products, working on well renowned brands Starbuck's, Coffee-Mate, Nescafe and Blue Bottle. Whether it is in terms of convenience, health or pleasure, we are committed to creating delicious beverages for our consumers. We make a difference with our passion for coffee.

 

Our mission is to delight our consumers wherever, whenever, and however by delivering memorable experiences centered around our coffee-based beverages - to achieve this we are committed to our talented, creative, and motivated team.  If you are excited and passionate about coffee and its potential, come join us and help create the future of the category.

 

We are on the lookout for a Senior Manager to lead ideation specialists, designers, consumer, and sensory insights experts & our Coffee Accelerator.  In this role, you will lead a local team in front-end-innovation, connecting business strategy with consumer-centricity to discover & bring to life differentiated innovation leveraging the powerful coffee technologies developed by our world class R&D colleagues. You will not be happy until these ideas are rapidly created into prototypes, are positively received by consumers, and appear on physical or virtual store shelves.

 

You will also be responsible for overseeing our Coffee Accelerator which provides a safe space to de-risk our most disruptive ideas, with the ambition to go from idea to shelf test in a few months, allowing us to fail fast or find pathways to scale breakthrough innovation.

 

Finally, you will be leading our local Sensory and Product Experience team, providing product insights to our talented product developers, to ensure our products always delight our consumers.

 

Primary Responsibilities:

• Get the best from a team of 7+ direct reports by coaching them to identify, build, and propose compelling business opportunities.
• Be the bridge between commercial strategy & R&D capabilities.
• Uniquely responsible for the end-to-end process of scoping, planning, executing, and facilitating ideation projects, identifying the most appropriate approach and tools to deliver success. Develop concepts which fill our 5-year Innovation & Renovation pipelines & achieve growth targets, performing well on measures of consumer desirability, technical feasibility, and commercial viability.
• Continuously seek improvement opportunities for our innovation approaches, methodologies, and tools to create stronger and more compelling consumer-centric concepts.
• Connect, exchange, and build innovation best practices with internal & external networks.
• Identify the sensorial renovation and potential white spaces of the world’s favorite coffees & enhancers to maintain our competitive edge.
• Oversee the Nestle Coffee Brands Accelerator.
• Coach the team for sustained success and support their future career progression.

Job Qualifications (Minimum Education, Experience, and Knowledge)

• Bachelor’s degree in business, Marketing, Innovation or related field, master’s degree a plus.
• Minimum 10 years’ experience, or related experience, CPG Innovation, Marketing, or development of consumer-centric innovation pipelines.
• Facilitation, networking, and relationship building skills. Ability to challenge status quo constructively, with a positive and can-do attitude.
• Strong track record of building internal innovation capab