The Ideation and New Ventures Director will be part of Blackboard’s Industry Strategy team that is responsible for driving Bb’s global growth strategy through the collection, development, and launch of new solutions. This person will play a critical role in one of Bb’s key initiatives to conceptualize and drive a process and structure for innovation across the organization’s portfolio. This person will have an instrumental role in all activities related to identifying and sizing of potential opportunities, solution prototyping and incubation, market validation, build-buy-partner analysis, business model design, and multi-year business plan development.
Essential Functions
Identify, evaluate and champion new business opportunities to address unmet/inadequately met client needs, and inefficiencies in market based on findings from ideation workshops, analysis of industry trends, competitive dynamics, investment trends, client insights, and Blackboard’s portfolio and capability assessment.
Build relationships and partnerships with industry thought leaders, VCs, innovation hubs, university and edtech incubators and accelerators to help build the ideation pipeline and achieve critical goals.
Conduct market validation to evaluate fit and response to new solution concept, test key go-to-market and other critical assumptions for business planning, and outline recommended path based on analysis of viable alternatives (build / partner / buy) to deliver the solution.
Lead business plan development for recommended investment / acquisition / partnership, including identifying stakeholder teams and establishing KPIs.
Design, setup, run internal/external stakeholder ideation workshops to desired outcomes, liaise/facilitate cross-functional decision making forums.
Develop and drive the adoption of standard process, structure, and tools to support the organizational ideation process.
Represent Blackboard at key industry events where applicable
Required Skills/Experience:
Bachelor's degree required; MBA preferred.
At least 6-8 years’ experience in growth strategy formulation and execution, particularly around new solution / ventures in B2B technology.
Experience in education industry.
Solid business acumen and demonstrated track record of identifying and successfully delivering on growth opportunities.
Outstanding problem solving skills, including ability to disaggregate complex problems and effective use of fact-based insights to analyze business issues and potential solution alternatives to achieve desired business objective.
Experience with leading cross-functional project assignments and successfully managing time-sensitive and high pressure projects.
Entrepreneurial, comfortable working autonomously and independently.
Excellent written and oral communication skills.
Experienced in completing market-sizing, documenting business plans, and supporting financial modeling.
Experience with market validation activities such as market research, rigorous testing of business assumptions, support solution concept testing, etc.
Collaborative. Proven ability to work cross functionally and informally to achieve overall business objectives, product sales, and go-to-market results.
Passion for technology and its opportunity to better enable learning opportunities for students, parents, teachers, and administrators.
Flexible and adaptive. Up to 30% travel, including occasional international travel required.
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