Collaboration & Innovation Project Manager (F55487)

Collaboration & Innovation Project Manager

RLE International is working on behalf of their Essex based Automotive Client, who are currently looking for a Collaboration & Innovation Project Manager to support and join their expanding team

Our client offers a wide range of unique opportunities available to suit some of the best people and brightest minds in the automotive industry.

They are positioned to become the most desirable Asian brand in Europe, and they need your help to get there.

Position Description:

Rate: GBPNeg depending on experience via Umbrella Company

Lead Innovation & Collaboration

This position arises at an enthralling time as our clients business transforms to produce various new products to meet their customers' changing demands. This exciting new role in a new function builds on their mission to improve the creativity and innovation achieved within and amongst a large manufacturing engineering team. Through your work, you will help modernise the business through incremental and radical innovations across the clients products and processes. Leveraging your degree, or demonstrable professional experience, you will work closely with experts distributed across different engineering functions taking responsibility for writing bids and managing program delivery to support their goals. Your role will require identifying new internal and external collaboration opportunities and developing methods to boost engineering creativity.

Due to the collaborative nature of the role, you will be expected to work onsite in an open office one day per week (flexibly) and, occasionally, travel to suppliers/customers/partners. You will share your transferable skills, knowledge, and experience within the team as you:

• Identify Opportunities for Targeted Innovation
• Leverage your natural curiosity and communication skills to understand critical problem statements that impact the teams delivery and think creatively to overcome them .

Explore: Utilise your knowledge of manufacturing to review the changing landscape and search for opportunities across industries to develop new, replicate and optimise processes

Collaborate: Maintain and grow the clients network and relationships with internal and external partners. Identify opportunities for collaborative projects that build on world–class manufacturing competencies to create new opportunities.

Innovate: Collaborate, deliver and lead work packages as part of funded and non–funded innovative R&D projects through formal and informal collaborations and co–operations .

Protect: Working on the cutting edge; you will develop new processes and technology, among other innovations. You will work with internal functions to secure intellectual property and disseminate learning.

In your lead role, you will:

Work with agility and manage your time to support in–flight projects whilst also searching for new projects and opportunities.

Manage collaborative projects and their stakeholders in terms of timing, risk, budget, issue resolution etc., working with the director of manufacturing as required.

Where appropriate, lead and coordinate critical funding applications, write compelling bids and manage and collaborate with internal and external stakeholders

Skills Required:

• Proven problem–solving abilities.
• Proven ability to manage complex projects involving multiple internal and external stakeholders.
• Ability to communicate powerfully (verbal and written) across all levels within an organisation.
• Highly effective stakeholder management experience.
• Strong command of Microsoft Office suite, including Excel, PowerPoint, and Word.

Skills Preferred:

Working knowledge of the UK funding landscape. SharePoint ownership or use of equivalent knowledge and information–sharing tools

Experience Required:

• Minimum of two years in the innovation sector (e.g. Innovate UK, University R&D, Catapults, or another innovative role, e.g. demonstrated success at a start–up).
• Experience of Coordinating and writing bids for funding, e.g. UKRI, Innovate UK or equivalent.
• Experience of writing compelling business plans to secure required resource allocation.
• Experience of managing technical projects and work package delivery

Education Required:

Bachelor s degree. Or 5+ years of industry experience without a degree.

Education Preferred:

Master s degree. Preferably MBA or an engineering subject or related.