Director of Academic & Innovation, Business School

Puesto: Director of Academic Experience & Innovation, Business School
Overview
Are you interested in joining a dynamic and international team of professionals to transform education? IE University's  Academic Experience & Innovation  is looking for an  Director  to join its team! Academic Experience & Innovation (AXI) designs and delivers the future of learning at IE Business School: the methodologies, program formats, assessment models, and AI capabilities that shape how students and faculty learn, build, and grow.

The IE Edge Lab is our experimentation engine, where we prototype what is next and scale what works. We take a human-centered approach to innovation, treating education as a transformational experience that accelerates careers and equips graduates to lead responsibly in a world reshaped by AI.

Why IE University?

Every story begins with a purpose, and ours has always been about people. Founded in 1973, IE University has continuously raised the bar to drive positive change through education. We believe education is more than a path to professional success; it is a catalyst for personal transformation and meaningful impact.

At IE University, we place people and their potential at the center of everything we do, empowering individuals to become extraordinary. We encourage bold thinking and foster a culture where innovation, curiosity, and courage lead to real-world impact. Together, we create an environment where talent thrives, and ideas shape the future.

Our mission

We support students in developing impact skills to live and lead with positive impact. This ignites a ripple effect:
We transform people, who then transform others, systems, society, and, ultimately, our world.

Our Purpose

To foster positive change.

Values

Cultivate the humanistic approach.

Empower your entrepreneurial spirit

Cherish the diversity of people, mind, and experience

Drive innovation with a proactive mindset

We are looking for a person to join a full-time position in  Madrid - IE Tower.

Responsibilities

Your role as a Director will involve:

We are looking for a Director of Academic Experience & Innovation to act as one of the Dean’s principal partners in turning academic strategy into delivered reality. Reporting directly to the Dean of AXI, you will initially lead a focused portfolio expected to include some of the school’s most important academic-transformation projects: framing the thinking behind them and seeing them through to working, high-quality experiences for students.

This role asks for a thinker and a doer in the same person. You will shape ideas rigorous enough to defend in front of faculty and staff and then deliver them on time and to a high standard. Neither half is optional.

The initial portfolio is expected to include two substantial areas of work, although the final scope will be defined with the Dean and may evolve as AXI priorities develop.

The Impact Skills Accelerator (ISA). Impact is one of the three pillars of IE Business School’s Next Best You mission, alongside Your Career and Your Purpose. Impact skills are the skills students need to make things happen in real workplaces, under the pressure and complexity of tough business challenges. The ISA is the experiential, certified program that builds them across foundation, execution, and innovation skills, embedded across the school’s program portfolio.

Your job is to take it to its next version: strengthen the methodology and use AI to multiply students’ opportunities to practice and to give them richer, faster feedback.

Critical and creative intelligence. Design and run the school’s exploration of how agentic AI can strengthen students’ critical thinking and creativity instead of thinking for them, with AI as a sparring partner and critic rather than an answer machine. You will frame the pedagogical approach, shape the student experience, run the first pilot, and build a credible way to measure whether thinking and creativity genuinely improve.

The aim is a model the school can defend academically and scale across programs.

Qualifications
To thrive in this role, you should possess the following qualifications:

The thinker and the doer. This is the non-negotiable combination. You can sit with a hard conceptual problem, and…