Director-New Ventures & Service Business Incubation

Key Responsibilities

• Build and manage a portfolio of new service business opportunities aligned with the Business Unit’s strategic priorities.
• Create original business concepts and actively source ideas from employees, customers, technology partners, startups, industry experts, and external ecosystems.
• Translate market trends, customer problems, company capabilities, and emerging technologies into specific and actionable business opportunities.
• Establish a repeatable process for collecting, evaluating, prioritizing, and advancing new business ideas.
• Maintain a balanced venture pipeline across near-term, adjacent, and longer-term opportunities.

• Build and manage a portfolio of new service business opportunities aligned with the Business Unit’s strategic priorities.
• Create original business concepts and actively source ideas from employees, customers, technology partners, startups, industry experts, and external ecosystems.
• Translate market trends, customer problems, company capabilities, and emerging technologies into specific and actionable business opportunities.
• Establish a repeatable process for collecting, evaluating, prioritizing, and advancing new business ideas.
• Maintain a balanced venture pipeline across near-term, adjacent, and longer-term opportunities.

• Develop and apply a disciplined evaluation framework covering customer need, willingness to pay, market potential, strategic fit, competitive advantage, technical feasibility, operational feasibility, regulatory risk, required investment, and potential profitability.
• Build initial business cases, including revenue models, cost structures, unit economics, investment requirements, partner economics, and scalability assumptions.
• Identify the most critical assumptions and risks that must be validated before additional investment is approved.
• Recommend which opportunities should advance to testing, be revised, remain on hold, or be stopped.
• Present clear investment recommendations to the Executive Director and other senior management stakeholders.

• Lead direct customer discovery, including interviews, surveys, field observation, prototype feedback, pricing tests, and willingness-to-pay studies.
• Validate the customer problem before committing significant resources to a solution.
• Determine the most appropriate business model, including subscription, transaction, membership, marketplace, B2B, B2B2C, revenue-share, outcome-based, or partner-sponsored models.
• Evaluate customer acquisition channels, retention drivers, service delivery requirements, and recurring-revenue potential.
• Convert customer and partner feedback into specific changes to the value proposition and business model.

• Define the scope, budget, timeline, success criteria, failure criteria, and decision gates for each test business.
• Assume leadership of selected projects that may already be in customer validation, pilot, or test-marketing stages at the time of hire.
• Launch new minimum viable services, prototypes, test-marketing programs, and commercial pilots.
• Lead cross-functional pilot teams involving product, engineering, software, data, sales, marketing, finance, legal, customer support, and operations.
• Secure the internal and external resources required to launch and operate each test business.
• Establish operating processes that allow the team to test the complete customer experience, rather than only the underlying technology.
• Resolve execution barriers and keep pilots moving toward defined learning and decision milestones.

• Establish measurable KPIs before each pilot begins.
• Track customer engagement, conversion, willingness to pay, retention, service utilization, partner participation, operational performance, unit economics, and scalability.
• Separate actual market evidence from assumptions, enthusiasm, or internal opinion.
• Determine, within an agreed test period, whether each venture should be scaled, modified, retested, paused, or discontinued.
• Prepare concise and fact-based Go, Pivot, or Stop recommendations for the Executive Director.
• Ensure that unsuccessful concepts are closed quickly and constructively, with key learning captured for future ventures.

• Create an investment-grade commercialization plan for validated opportunities.
• Define the go-to-market strategy, operating model, organizational requirements, technology roadmap, partner ecosystem, financial plan, and implementation milestones.
• Secure executive approval and funding for commercialization.
• Lead the transition from pilot or test marketing into a fully operating commercial business.
• Establish the leadership, organizational structure, processes, and performance management system required for scale.
• Determine when a validated venture should remain within the incubation team, transition to an…