Innovation Specialist; Portfolio, and Learning), P TA Office of Innovation

Position: Innovation Specialist, (Portfolio, Performance and Learning), P-3, #00137311, TA, 364 days, Office of Innovation,
Location: Sweden

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 for as long as we are needed. 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 professional and personal development that will help them reinforce a sense of purpose while serving children and communities across the world. We welcome everyone who wants to belong and grow in a diverse and passionate culture, coupled with an attractive compensation and benefits package.

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

For every child, the right to Innovation

The Office of Innovation is a creative, interactive, and agile team in UNICEF. We sit at a unique intersection, where an organization that works on huge global issues meets the startup thinking, the technology, and the partners that turn this energy into scalable solutions.

UNICEF's Office of Innovation creates opportunities for the world's children by focusing on where new markets can meet their vital needs. We do this by:

* Connecting youth communities (or more broadly -- anyone disconnected or under-served) to decision-makers, and to each other, to deliver informed, relevant and sustained programmes that build better, stronger futures for children.

* Provoking change for children through an entrepreneurial approach -- in a traditionally risk-averse field -- to harness rapidly moving innovations and apply them to serve the needs of all children.

* Creating new models of partnership that leverage core business values across the public, private and academic sectors in order to deliver fast, and lasting results for children.

The Global Innovation Strategy 2.0 strategy and aims to achieve critical shifts in the way UNICEF currently works on innovation, building on what has been successful, while also addressing lessons learned and capitalizing on new opportunities. These critical shifts are:

* Setting global priorities based on the needs of children and young people, focusing on those areas with the largest need

* Focusing on scaling innovations

* Catalysing inventions where no known solution exists

* Connecting the organization and convening critical stakeholders to solve the most pressing challenges facing children and young people

These shifts will be enabled by:

* Establishing a portfolio management approach

* Innovative funding and financing and the application of financial engineering

* Ensuring rapid learning and fostering collaboration

* Building innovation culture and competence across UNICEF.

About the UNICEF Venture Fund, Funds and Financing

Established in 2015, the UNICEF Venture Fund has been specifically designed to finance early stage, open-source technology that can benefit children. The core motivation of the Venture Fund is to identify "clusters" or portfolios of initiatives around emerging technology - so that UNICEF can both shape markets and also learn about and guide these technologies to benefit children. We invest in solutions that can impact the lives of the most vulnerable children.

We find these solutions clustered around $100 billion industries in frontier technology spaces, such as: UAVs, virtual and augmented reality, artificial intelligence, nano-satellites, and human dynamics. The Venture Fund is scaling its investment portfolio with the aim of investing in 20 start-ups every year and provides funding to CO-led projects. The current portfolio of companies consists of several cohorts developing and piloting solutions in virtual and augmented reality, data science and artificial intelligence, blockchain, UAVs, IoT, and in assistive technology.

How can you make a difference?

The Innovation Specialist (Portfolio Performance and Learning) will lead efforts to create, coordinate and compile knowledge products for the Venture Fund team, in close collaboration across the Solutions team. The goal is to capture results and learnings from frontier tech investments for the Fund for…