Innovation Hub Manager

About Kaelo
Kaelo provides essential healthcare solutions ensuring the physical and psychosocial wellbeing of all South Africans towards lasting social change. Kaelo meets the Healthcare needs of Corporate and Retail clients across South Africa - products offerings include Medical Insurance, Medical Aid, Gap Insurance, Kaelo Money and employee assistance programmes.

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Role Purpose

The Innovation Hub Manager builds and runs Kaelo’s research and development capability. The department exists to identify, prove and industrialise new product concepts, agentic and AI-based capability, and emerging technology that can create commercial advantage for the organisation. It works ahead of the production estate, taking ideas from opportunity through to a proven, de-risked solution that graduates into Systems Solutions for production ownership.

This is a management role rather than a hands-on engineering role. The incumbent supports the IT Executive in executing the AI and innovation strategy, acting as an enabler, and is accountable for the quality of the innovation pipeline, the rigour with which ideas are tested and the commercial return the portfolio generates. They achieve this by building a capable team from a largely greenfield base, empowering the AI Architect to own technical direction, and holding the portfolio to account through stage-gated governance, documented operating procedures and honest reporting of results.

Key Responsibilities

1. Managing & Team Capability

• Manage the Innovation Hub, setting into action the direction set by the IT Executive, prioritising initiatives, establishing ways of working and maintaining a culture in which disciplined experimentation and early stopping are treated as productive outcomes.
• Manage the team from a largely greenfield base; develop and retain scarce AI, analysis and design skills.
• Delegate technical ownership appropriately, empowering the AI Architect to set reference architecture and engineering standards.
• Set objectives, manage performance and manage departmental budget, capacity, partners and vendors.
• Develop and maintain standard operating procedures (SOPs) for the Innovation Hub, including stage-gate, experimentation and handover procedures.
• Operationalise and enforce Kaelo’s policies within the department, including responsible AI, information security and data protection policies, and address non-compliance.

2. Innovation Strategy & Portfolio

• Translate the AI and innovation strategy set by the IT Executive into a sequenced portfolio of initiatives balancing near-term return against longer-horizon capability.
• Run stage-gated governance through the Project Manager so that initiatives are funded incrementally and stopped decisively when evidence does not support them.
• Horizon-scan emerging technology, particularly in artificial intelligence, and assess its applicability to health insurance and financial services.
• Report portfolio progress, learning and realised benefit to the IT Executive and business leadership.

3. Opportunity Identification & Commercial Validation

• Engage business and executive stakeholders to identify opportunities of genuine commercial or member value.
• Ensure every initiative has a framed use case, value hypothesis, success criteria and measurement approach before build effort is committed.
• Ensure realised benefit is measured honestly after solutions reach production.
• Build relationships with external partners, vendors, start-ups and academic institutions where they accelerate capability.

4. Responsible AI & Risk

• Establish responsible AI practices covering fairness, bias, explainability, human oversight, data provenance and model risk.
• Ensure the use of member or production data in experimentation is governed, minimised,…