Senior Manager, Corporate Innovation (Climate)

About MaRS
MaRS Discovery District (@MaRSDD) in Toronto is the one of the world's largest urban innovation hubs.
MaRS supports promising high-growth companies to scale their businesses globally, while tackling key societal challenges in areas such as Health, Cleantech, Finance, Transportation, AI, and others. In addition to helping start-ups launch, grow and scale, the MaRS community is dedicated to cross-disciplinary collaboration, commercialization of discoveries, and driving ideas to impact.
We are a purpose-driven organization on a mission to make the world a better place through inclusive innovation. This commitment to inclusion, equity and diversity are core to who we are and what we believe and, as such, encourage applications from members of diverse identity groups, including those who have been historically excluded and marginalized. You are welcome at MaRS.
We want you to be as successful throughout our recruitment process as possible. Please get in touch with us if there's anything we can do to make your experience more accessible and inclusive, including accommodations for differing (dis)abilities.
About Ventures & Ecosystems Group (V&E)
This role resides within the V&E group at MaRS. V&E works with over 1400 innovation-driven science and technology startups. V&E helps entrepreneurs commercialize innovations with high business growth potential in Canada and globally by facilitating access to the customer, talent, funding, marketing and stakeholder connections required to successfully scale their business.
About The Role
A key member of the MaRS Corporate Innovation team, the Senior Manager is responsible for leading the delivery of a range of fee-for-service engagements for MaRS' partners in energy, health, finance and enterprise sectors, located in Canada and internationally.
These external engagements are aimed at supporting partners with adoption of innovation for inclusive growth – project examples include innovation challenges, sector transformation, and technology adoption projects. These projects often involve additional engagement with stakeholders in the innovation ecosystem. The Senior Manager is also responsible for supporting business development activities for acquisition or renewal of partners. It is expected for the senior manager to establish a deep relationship with the client, proactively identifying issues and developing solutions, and to act as a leader for direct and indirect reports.
Key Responsibilities

• Program and Project Management
• Lead the development of research reports, policy papers, issue briefs, presentations and other products that would be used to support client engagements, business development, and internal strategy and thought leadership.
• Activities include overall management of a program or project contract, project planning, tracking project schedules/ execution progress, day-to-day direction of client projects, and developing high quality reports, presentations, evaluations, and other client-facing communications materials.
• Take the lead role in design, development and delivery of Challenges when working with MaRS's partner organizations.
• Lead, advise or work on a project team to successfully deliver partner engagements leveraging program and project management best practices in order to deliver project outcomes which exceed client expectations, while ensuring the project is on budget and on time.
• Lead, advise or conduct research to draw commercially relevant insights from emerging sector trends, technologies, investment opportunities, and business models, and tailor to specific client needs.
• Actively manage and strengthen current client and stakeholder relationships with a view towards contributing to tangible innovation adoption and other specific project objectives, and identification and closing of follow-on partnership and advisory business opportunities. Strengthen internal stakeholder relationships between different teams and departments at MaRS (i.e. Communications, Legal, etc.), and act as a leader and advisor to colleagues, including direct and indirect reports.
• Provide mentorship, identify and enable growth opportunities for team members. Identify and provide input on growth strategy for the Partnerships teams. Share project learnings to continuously improve and enhance projects undertaken at MaRS. Identify opportunities to collaborate with teams across MaRS.
• Create value for ventures by identifying opportunities for engagement during client deliveries, making warm introductions, and sharing market insights.
• Support with preparation of proposals and contracts, scope projects with clients, contribute to extending work and developing new business.
• Additional activities include resource management; ensuring that direct and/or indirect reports are advised and supported throughout project work, providing mentorship and identifying growth opportunities within projects and beyond

Qualifications:

• 5+ years of previous management experience (e.g. project or client management)
• Business development skills – the ability to form deep client relationships, understand client's problems, identify and develop solutions to meet and exceed client's needs, close sales engagements that are often in the range of $100k - $500k (sometimes larger)
• Completed Bachelor's Degree
• Commitment to excellence – detail-oriented and mindset of continuous improvement to develop and deliver client engagements
• Team player and leader – develop and mentor team members. Work collaboratively with the direct team as well as across departments to share information and collaboratively develop new solutions
• Curious, insightful and pragmatic – think holistically about client problems and solutions, identify and connect things that the clients may have missed, apply learnings and insights across clients. Ability to quickly learn new industries and areas of focus
• Getting-it-done mindset – be comfortable working with ambiguity, and be resourceful in developing and delivering solutions for the client while balancing multiple projects simultaneously
• High degree of comfort with technical topics, specifically with regards to the electricity system, as well as business concepts and issues
• Communication and story-telling – exceptional verbal and written skills to develop and deliver narratives for engagement deliveries, deepen relationship with clients and ecosystem engagement
• Passionate – cares about innovation, technology, the energy sector, and building the MaRS' Partnerships revenue stream to support MaRS' mission of helping innovators create a better world
• Client empathy – being able to put yourself in the client's shoes to understand their challenges and working collaboratively with them as a partner helping them achieve the incremental milestones on their innovation journey. Be invested in the client outcomes

Salary Range: $91,400 - $114,000, up to 10% discretionary incentive, benefits and paid time-off.
Applications will close at 5pm EDT on June 23, 2023.
Applicants must be legally eligible to work in Canada and reside in Ontario.