Innovation Portfolio Manager

Innovation Portfolio Manager Roke Built on a 70-year heritage, Roke offers specialist knowledge in sensors, communications, cyber, and AI and ML. We change the way organisations think and act – through dynamic insights from the analysis of multiple layers of data. We take care of the innovative, technical stuff that keeps everyone safe – that’s our mission, passion, and motivation.

Role The Science & Technology (S&T) function within Roke Global Services is being established to provide a coherent coordination layer across innovation, strategy, road mapping and knowledge management. The function balances client demand, technology push and operational priorities to shape direction, accelerate innovation pull-through, maximise reuse of knowledge and intellectual property, and build future-ready capability across Global Services. This role will sit at the centre of that function, helping connect people, processes, information and priorities into a single, organised and effective operating rhythm.

We are looking for an experienced, organised and highly detail-oriented Delivery Manager to help cohere the whole S&T function. Reporting into the S&T leadership team, the role will coordinate the moving parts of the function, provide ownership of selected areas of activity, and ensure the right cadence, governance, reporting and follow-through are in place. The successful candidate will be comfortable operating across multiple stakeholders and topics, from applied innovation and strategic planning through to communications, knowledge sharing and cross-functional coordination.

Experience with innovation, science and technology environments is essential; experience with Power BI and AI-enabled approaches would be highly beneficial to improve dashboards, reporting and knowledge analysis.

Job Purpose &

Key Responsibilities
• Act as the central coordination point for the S&T function, ensuring coherence across applied innovation, road mapping, strategy and knowledge management
• Establish and maintain the operating rhythm for S&T, including governance, planning cycles, reviews, reporting, action tracking and stakeholder engagement
• Own selected parts of the function as required, driving them forward from concept through implementation and into business-as-usual operation
• Coordinate the interfaces between S&T and Engineering, Product, Sales, Accounts, Partner Services, Operations and wider leadership to ensure alignment and progress
• Support the management of innovation activity, including tracking ideas, coordinating gate reviews, maintaining portfolio visibility and helping ensure pull-through into deliverable capability or product outcomes
• Maintain a clear programme-level view of priorities, risks, issues, dependencies, resource demand and delivery progress across the S&T function
• Develop dashboards, reporting views and management information to support decision-making, transparency and performance tracking across S&T
• Coordinate knowledge management activities across S&T, including the flow, curation and distribution of insight from problem books, IP, Communities of Interest, roadshows, show-and-tells and lunch-and-learns
• Support the creation and maintenance of integrated roadmaps covering future skills, tooling, technology direction and capability readiness
• Help shape and coordinate strategic initiatives, including AI-related activity, communications planning, academic engagement and thought leadership where appropriate
• Build trusted working relationships with senior stakeholders, sub-function leads and contributors across the business, ensuring actions are understood and followed through
• Ensure artefacts, plans, trackers, decisions and outputs are well structured, version controlled and…