Lead, Innovation & Collaboration Engineer

​Position Description:

• This position arises at an enthralling time as our business transforms to produce various new products to meet our customers' changing demands.

• This exciting new role in a new function builds on our mission to improve the creativity and innovation achieved within and amongst a large manufacturing engineering team.

• Through your work, you will help modernise our business through incremental and radical innovations across our products and processes.

• Leveraging your degree, or demonstrable professional experience, you will work closely with experts distributed across different engineering functions taking responsibility for writing bids and managing program delivery to support their goals.

• Your role will require identifying new internal and external collaboration opportunities and developing methods to boost engineering creativity.

• Due to the collaborative nature of the role, you will be expected to work onsite in our open office one day per week (flexibly) and, occasionally, travel to suppliers/customers/partners.

• We need you to share your transferable skills, knowledge and experience within our team as you:

• Identify Opportunities for Targeted Innovation

• Leverage your natural curiosity and communication skills to understand critical problem statements that impact the team's delivery and think creatively to overcome them

• Explore & utilise your knowledge of manufacturing to review the changing landscape and search for opportunities across industries to develop new, replicate and optimise our processes

• Collaborate & maintain and grow our network and relationships with internal and external partners. Identify opportunities for collaborative projects that build on our world-class manufacturing competencies to create new opportunities.

• Innovate & collaborate, deliver and lead work packages as part of funded and non-funded innovative R&D projects through formal and informal collaborations and co-operations

• Protect & Working on the cutting edge; you will develop new processes and technology, among other innovations. You will work with our internal functions to secure intellectual property and disseminate learning. In particular, in your lead role, you will:

• Work with agility and manage your time to support in-flight projects whilst also searching for new projects and opportunities

• Manage collaborative projects and their stakeholders in terms of timing, risk, budget, issue resolution etc., working with the director of manufacturing as required

• Where appropriate, lead and coordinate critical funding applications, write compelling bids and manage and collaborate with internal and external stakeholders Proven problem-solving abilities

Skills Required:

• Proven ability to manage complex projects involving multiple internal and external stakeholders

• Ability to communicate powerfully (verbal and written) across all levels within an organisation

• Highly effective stakeholder management

• Strong command of Microsoft Office suite, including Excel, PowerPoint and Word.

Skills Preferred:

• Working knowledge of the UK funding landscape

• SharePoint ownership or use of equivalent knowledge and information-sharing tools

Experience Required:

• Minimum of two years in the innovation sector (e.g. Innovate UK, University R&D, Catapults, or another innovative role, e.g. demonstrated success at a start-up)

• Coordinating and writing bids for funding, e.g. UKRI, Innovate UK or equivalent

• Writing compelling business plans to secure required resource allocation

• Management of technical projects and work package delivery

Education required:

• Bachelor's degree. Or, 5+ years of industry experience without a degree.

Education Preferred:

• Master's degree. Preferably MBA or an engineering subject or related