Senior Adviser Innovation (Ventures), P5, FTA, Office of Innovation, Stockholm, Sweden (#00117145)

UNICEF works in some of the world’s toughest places, to reach the world’s most disadvantaged children. To save their lives. To defend their rights. To help them fulfill their potential.

Across 190 countries and territories, we work for every child, everywhere, every day, to build a better world for everyone.

And we never give up.

For every child, hope

The Office of Innovation (OoI) works to catalyse UNICEF's and all its partners’ expertise and resources against key children-outcomes bottlenecks, with a view to continuously ideate and scale the most effective solutions with transformational potential at scale against the childrelated SDGs. The office is doing this by continuously exploring new ways of accelerating results for children, investing across a range of early stage solutions, and harnessing internal and external expertise towards continuously iterating and finetuning the most promising solutions for children through a systematic portfolio management approach, and leveraging all stakeholders’ innovation energy, knowhow and resources from the intergovernmental, multilateral, private sector and non-governmental fora (think tank, academia).

How can you make a difference?

1. Set strategy for early-stage, open source explorations that leverage frontier technology, in line with UNICEF’s Innovation Strategy.

2. Guide the portfolio of early-stage pilots to maximise return, sustainability and acceleration of promising solutions.

3. Management of Ventures team and collaboration across OOI teams and hubs to implement OOI’s Ventures strategy.

4. Provide thought leadership and external positioning of OOI in the priority areas, such as governance and standards for emerging tech areas in relation to rights of children and UNICEF’s priorities.

5. Assess technical and financial resource needs and provide technical leadership to related partnership development.

6. Lead engagement with Divisions across UNICEF.

To qualify as an advocate for every child you will have…

• An advanced university degree (Master’s or higher) in Political Science, International Relations, Economics, Business Administration, or another relevant technical field. *A first University Degree in a relevant field combined with 3 additional years of professional experience may be accepted in lieu of an Advanced University Degree.

• A minimum of 10 years of relevant professional experience is required at national and international levels.

  • Experience in strategy development and execution in the field of early-stage innovation
  • Experience in establishing, growing and guiding global teams, including starting up and launch of new platforms and initiatives
  • Experience in setting and guiding investment strategies, including the use of innovative financing and crypto-based models
  • Knowledge of key trends in open source and frontier technologies
  • A strong network of contacts within a range of relevant partners is an asset.
• Developing country work experience and/or familiarity with emergency is considered an asset.
• Fluency in English is required. Knowledge of another official UN language (Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian or Spanish) or a local language is an asset.

For every Child, you demonstrate...

UNICEF's values of Care, Respect, Integrity, Trust, and Accountability (CRITA) and core competencies in Communication, Working with People and Drive for Results.

The UNICEF competencies required for this post are...

• Nurtures, Leads and Manages People (2)
• Demonstrates Self Awareness and Ethical Awareness (2)
• Works Collaboratively with others (2)
• Builds and Maintains Partnerships (2)
• Innovates and Embraces Change (2)
• Thinks and Acts Strategically (2)
• Drive to achieve impactful results (2)
• Manages ambiguity and complexity (2)

To view our competency framework, please visit here.

Click here to learn more about UNICEF’s values and competencies.

UNICEF is committed to diversity and inclusion within its workforce, and encourages all candidates, irrespective of gender, nationality, religious and ethnic backgrounds, including persons living with disabilities, to apply to become a part of the organization.

UNICEF has a zero-tolerance policy on conduct that is incompatible with the aims and objectives of the United Nations and UNICEF, including sexual exploitation and abuse, sexual harassment, abuse of authority and discrimination. UNICEF also adheres to strict child safeguarding principles. All selected candidates will be expected to adhere to these standards and principles and will therefore undergo rigorous reference and background checks. Background checks will include the verification of academic credential(s) and employment history. Selected candidates may be required to provide additional information to conduct a background check.

Remarks:

Mobility is a condition of international professional employment with UNICEF and an underlying premise of the international civil service.

Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted and advance to the next stage of the selection process.

This position is not considered an elevated risk role. However, UNICEF reserves the right to conduct further vetting/ assessment within the scope of child safeguarding as appropriate.

UNICEF only considers higher educational qualifications obtained from an institution accredited/recognized in the World Higher Education Database (WHED), a list updated by the International Association of Universities (IAU) / United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The list can be accessed at http://www.whed.net/

The VA is open to all (internal and external) candidates.