Job Opportunity for Manager, Social Innovation at Teach for India in Multiple Locations

Position Summary

Reporting to: Director, Alumni Impact

As Manager, Social Innovation you will play a critical role in executing the vision and strategy of Teach For India – to support Alumni to launch innovative new enterprises in the education space. You will be responsible for spearheading InnovatED – Teach For India’s national platform for incubating early-stage entrepreneurs.

Through this role, you will be helping promising education entrepreneurs overcome the barriers that exist between coming up with a great idea and building a strong, sustainable organization.

Responsibilities:

Primary responsibility: Lead the InnovatED initiative end-to-end

• Design: You will refine the design of the overall InnovatED initiative based on user feedback and the emergent needs of the entrepreneur community. You will also design convenings, sessions, calls, and other spaces/platforms of interaction for entrepreneurs.
• Storytelling: You will evangelize the InnovatED initiative to both prospective entrepreneurs and diverse players in the ecosystem (such as incubators, funders, non-profits, government and media).
• Network and relationship building: You will forge long-term, goodwill-based partnerships with a range of ecosystem actors (mentioned above) – in service of our entrepreneurs. You will also build positive and enduring relationships with every entrepreneur incubated by InnovatED, as well as enable peer-to-peer collaboration within the collective of entrepreneurs incubated by InnovatED.
• Outreach: You will drive awareness-building activities to spread the word about InnovatED and what it offers – to promising, eligible entrepreneurs from the Teach For India network – which includes both Alumni and Fellows, particularly those running Be The Change Projects (BTCPs). This would include a multi-channel marketing and communications campaign.
• Selection: You will conduct a rigorous, multi-stage selection process to handpick the most promising entrepreneurs via a combination of internal selection (which you will lead) and external selection (where you will mobilize a panel of experts from the ecosystem).
• Delivering the program: You will deliver the 6 core elements of InnovatED’s value proposition – access to funding, access to a dedicated coach, series of national innovation bootcamps, peer community of entrepreneurs, access to the ecosystem, and a knowledge toolkit. In addition, you will provide any urgent, need-based support to the entrepreneurs.
• Thought-partnering and mentoring: InnovatED, in its current form, has a full-time coaching consultant on board who works 1:1 with each entrepreneur. Your role will be to complement the coach as a thought partner and sounding board. From time to time, you will even play the role of a friend, counsel, and guide. It will also be your role to keep the entrepreneurs accountable to their commitments and make sure they stick to agreed milestones.
• Delivering events: You will be responsible for executing three residential bootcamps every year. This will require you to be strong on operations and logistics, design and planning, as well as influencing stakeholders, and community-building.
• Facilitating sessions: During bootcamps, a majority of the sessions will be delivered by top facilitators and experts from the ecosystem. In addition, you will facilitate a handful of sessions in areas where you are best poised to deliver them yourself.
• Developing knowledge frameworks: You will play an important role in improving, democratizing, and evangelizing InnovatED’s knowledge frameworks.
• Project management and codification: As part of ‘managing the project’, you will maintain a record of all the important information pertaining to the project, keep a track of all the different work streams and monitor progress across these streams, as well as codify knowledge and insights for the benefit of entrepreneurs, your larger team, the organization, and the ecosystem. You will also keep a keen eye on theprogrambudget and ensure other kinds of compliance, with a view on running InnovatED in a responsible and resourceful manner.
• Evaluation and impact: You will continuously gauge the efficacy of InnovatED as an initiative, and make iterations based on the insights you generate. You will similarly monitor the organizational health and individual development of the entrepreneurs we incubate. You will also report the impact of InnovatED and the impact of our entrepreneurs – to donors and other internal and external stakeholders.
• Innovation: Finally, you must look at InnovatED itself as an evolving, emergent venture that is constantly improving itself. While most of the responsibilities mentioned above fall into the category of ‘business as usual’, an important component of your work will be to innovate yourself to push InnovatED’s bar higher. 

Secondary responsibility: Find synergies with Teach For India’s Fellowship and Alumni programmes, help cultivate the pipeline for InnovatED, and sustain and grow Alumni-run organizations

• You will support pre-incubation efforts at the city level to activate the pipeline and build formative competencies in Fellows and Alumni running projects, who can eventually become strong candidates for an InnovatED application. You will design and co-own two pre-incubation tracks with onboarded consultants from the ecosystem.
• You will design new initiatives towards post-incubation with ecosystem consultants and city-level Alumni teams for past incubated entrepreneurs by understanding their needs regularly, providing low-touch support, and facilitating Communities of Practice.
• You will refine and build new phases of the Be The Change technology platform and build the capacity of the Fellowship program team to help manage city-level project (BTCP) data and strengthen the social innovation infrastructure of Teach For India.
• You must be a team player and contribute to the learning and development of your peers and colleagues on the Alumni Impact team at Teach For India.

Tertiary responsibility: Be an influencer in the Indian social innovation ecosystem, as well as within the Teach For All network

• Continue to build InnovatED’s brand as an initiative that is respected in the Indian entrepreneurship ecosystem – through enabling trust, facilitating collaboration, and through your thought leadership.
• InnovatED has established itself as a benchmark for many of our network partners across the Teach For All network. It also currently supports a handful of education incubators from regional network partners (eg: Teach For Armenia, Mexico, Nepal, Empieza Por Educar). You will continue to maintain these pre-existing relationships and engagements, and seek to build on them to take InnovatED to a more influential position within the network

Minimum Qualifications, Experiences and Expectations

• 3-5 years of relevant work experience in the field of entrepreneurship, innovation or leadership
• A Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in any field
• Strong understanding of innovation principles, practices, methods and approaches – such as human-centered design, business model canvas, and theory of change  
• Strong program design and design-thinking skills
• Strong project planning and project management skills
• Strong program execution, session design and facilitation skills
• Strong understanding of impact measurement and evaluation
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills 
• Excellent relationship-building and influencing skills so as to foster networks and partnerships among organizations and stakeholders (at all levels of seniority)
• The ability to combine big picture thinking with attention to detail
• An orientation towards data-driven decision-making
• User centricity and a service mindset

Preferred Qualifications, Experiences and Expectations

• Personal experience of starting, managing or being part of an early-stage social enterprise
• Experience in supporting or working with early-stage entrepreneurs, including an insight into what it takes to start a new organization e.g. fundraising, team-building, sales, legal
• Knowledge of education and entrepreneurship in the Indian context
• The ability to think in terms of systems and platforms