Innovation Manager

Job Purpose

Own and lead the end-to-end innovation agenda for the brand/category, ensuring a consumer-led innovation pipeline that delivers incremental growth, faster time-to-market, and strong cross-functional alignment.

Duties And Responsibilities

• Innovation Strategy & Pipeline Ownership
• Define, shape, and prioritize innovation growth opportunities across brand, category, and pack formats, grounded in deep consumer, shopper, and category understanding.
• Identify unmet consumer needs, emerging consumer groups, and category white spaces to fuel a robust innovation agenda.
• Build, maintain, and prioritize a rolling innovation pipeline that balances consumer desirability, strategic fit, feasibility, and ROI.
• Lead the end-to-end innovation process from ideation to launch, ensuring adherence to Stage-Gate governance, clear decision-making guardrails, and continuous improvement in time-to-market.
• Manager project timelines, risks, and dependencies across R&D, Supply Chain, Finance, Legal, Procurement and Marketing.
• Consumer-Led Development & Validation
• Partner closely with CMI to translate consumer, shopper, and customer insights into actionable innovation strategies and decisions.
• Support design direction, product and pack format choices, and consumer experience innovation in collaboration with brand, design and CMI teams.
• Lead concept development and innovation proposition and manage with CMI consumer and market testing to validate concepts, refine propositions, and ensure strong in-market acceptance.
• Business, Financial & Portfolio Impact
• Develop compelling innovation business cases, tracking project costs, risks, and returns throughout the development cycle.
• Assess and manage the impact of innovation initiatives on total portfolio performance, including volume, value, and brand equity.
• Collaborate with Finance and RMG to evaluate and optimize liquid and pack COGS, production costs, and overheads, balancing margin delivery with consumer appeal and competitive advantage.
• Culture, Ways of Working & People Leadership
• Champion a strong innovation culture within Marketing, promoting creativity, experimentation, and agile ways of working.
• Define and embed clear innovation ways of working, roles, and cross-functional responsibilities.
• Act as the central connection between global, regional, and local stakeholders.
• Directly manage and coach the Innovation Specialist, ensuring high-quality delivery, capability development, and effective execution of the innovation agenda in line with agreed processes and guardrails.

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