Ideation Administrator at Vodafone Global Enterprise

Role Purpose/Business Unit:

The Ideation Administrator is a key role in the Ideation team, providing support and coordination of several Ideation activities. The successful candidate executes ideation activities related to the generation, management, and processing of new ideas from across the business through Innovation Challenges and the Innovation Academy. The Ideation Administrator will also play a key role in driving the culture of innovation and improving innovation knowledge and skills across the Group. This individual should be passionate about innovation, learning and creating the future.

Your responsibilities will include:

The main functions of the Ideation Administrator are as follows:

Ideation programmes:

• Processing, analysing, reporting, and operationalising of the internal and external-facing ideation programme. A key element is the selection, support and integration of Innovation Champions across all Vodacom Market BUs.
• Challenges: Coordination and execution of challenges and convert these to applicable online challenges and hackathons. Build and maintain blueprints of the various challenges. Support BUs running their own challenges. This includes but is not limited to building and formulating the business problem, problem questions and associated score cards as well as coordinating and facilitating scoring, support, and judgement. A key annual challenge is the Vodacom Hackathon.

Culture:

• Spirit: Closely integrate and support the Spirit programme from an innovation and ideation perspective. 
• Communications: Develop and execute a strong group-wide communications plan for the ideation programmes, its activities, and achievements. 
• Evangelise Innovation: Continuously canvas the Innovation function at town halls, inductions, and other Vodacom business unit event.  

Stakeholder engagement:

• Stakeholder landscape: Develop and maintain a landscape map of the various internal and external stakeholders.
• Innovation Champions (~100 BU Innovation representatives) community: Support and engagement of Innovation Champions and representatives per BU and OpCo. Manage the community, foster, and maintain relationships and ensure vibrancy and engagement with ICs across Vodacom Group. 
• Coordinate and facilitate Innovation Champion workshops and conferences and liaise with Business Managers to support the Innovation Champions. 
• Ideation reporting: Operationally report on ideation activities, and programme statuses. 
• Internal/external engagement: Continuous engagements with the Innovation stakeholders (Opcos, Vodafone, Innovation Hubs, etc.), including daily interactions, monthly sessions, etc. 

Ideation/Innovation projects: Execute ad-hoc projects to further the Ideation and Innovation processes, including – but not limited to:

• Digital platform: Build innovation challenges on the Innovate! digital platform, maintain and develop the platform.  This includes active bug and system enhancement tracking,  liaising with the vendor and all internal parties (e.g. supply chain, and IT). 
• Innovate! CEO awards: Sourcing candidate ideas and drafting list of nominations to be considered for annual CEO Innovation Award

Key accountabilities and decision ownership: 

• Idea management and operationalising (processing, reporting and administration) of the ideation programmes as per the defined processes and KPIs.
• Engaging and supporting of key stakeholders for Ideation and Innovation across Vodacom Group (i.e. Innovation Champions, Idea Originators, etc.).
• Innovation evangelisation, training, and communications.
• Facilitate and execute Ideation services such as Challenges, Hackathons, and Innovation Days  to the various BUs in Vodacom Group.
• Executing Ideation and innovation initiatives

The ideal candidate for this role will have:

• Matric/Grade 12 (or SAQA Accredited equivalent) is essential.
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent is a requirement
• Strong administrative and reporting skills with the ability to work well with others, collectively and individually. 
• Idea generation and ability to facilitate idea generation in others.
• Project coordination and management. 
• Communications skills including interpersonal skills, presentation skills, training and facilitation skills, negotiation skills, relationship building ability, etcetera.
• Good networking and engagement skills.