Associate Director, Innovation

Associate Director, Innovation

At Thermo Fisher's PPD clinical research business, we're using digital innovation, data science, and AI to reimagine how life-changing therapies reach patients. Our teams combine deep scientific expertise with advanced analytics, automation, and digital platforms to make research smarter, faster, and more connected.

You'll join a culture that values experimentation, learning, and collaboration — where your ideas can help shape how we deliver life-saving solutions and improve global health outcomes. Whether you're a data engineer, product manager, software developer, or AI scientist, you'll find opportunities here to apply your skills to work that truly matters — improving global health outcomes.

The Clinical Development Strategy and Innovation (CDSI) team is part of Thermo Fisher's Clinical Research Group (CRG). This team leads and integrates strategy, operational excellence, and disruptive innovation to accelerate drug development for customers and patients. The innovation strategy team aims to uncover groundbreaking opportunities, rigorously validate concepts, and spearhead industry leadership to revolutionize drug development through transformative innovations.

Position Overview The Associate Director, Innovation is accountable for shaping and advancing a defined innovation landscape or portfolio segment, translating strategic priorities into a coherent set of discovery themes, validated opportunities, and evidence-based decisions. The role balances hands-on opportunity leadership with portfolio-level prioritization, stakeholder alignment, and rigorous application of the innovation process in a global business context.

This role owns the quality, focus, and progression of a portfolio of potential opportunities through discovery and concept validation. Working across business, digital, data, science, and technology stakeholders, you will ensure that opportunities are grounded in meaningful needs, supported by evidence, and developed to the point at which a clear decision can be made to stop, pivot, continue validation, or hand over a validated concept to an appropriate business owner.

Key Responsibilities

Innovation Landscape & Discovery Portfolio Leadership

• Accountable for shaping and advancing an assigned innovation landscape or focus area, translating strategic priorities into clear discovery themes, opportunity spaces, and learning objectives
• Own a portfolio of discovery and validation activities within the assigned remit, ensuring coherence, focus, and alignment to business priorities
• Lead the identification, framing, prioritization, and validation of potential opportunities, maintaining focus on the areas with the strongest strategic relevance and value potential
• Guide trade-off decisions across the portfolio, balancing exploration of new opportunity spaces with deeper validation of the most promising concepts
• Translate portfolio evidence and learning into recommendations on where to explore, validate further, pause, pivot, or stop
• Support broader innovation planning by identifying patterns, unmet needs, emerging opportunities, risks, and interdependencies across focus areas

Opportunity Discovery, Experimentation & Validation

• Maintain continuity of opportunity framing and value propositions from initial exploration through concept validation and decision readiness
• Ensure opportunities are supported by clear problem statements, robust assumptions, relevant evidence, and well-defined value propositions
• Oversee the quality of discovery, opportunity shaping, experimentation, concept testing, and evidence synthesis across the team
• Determine whether opportunities should progress, pivot, stop, or undergo further validation based on strategic fit, evidence strength, desirability, feasibility, and value potential
• Define clear validation outcomes and decision criteria, ensuring concepts reach an appropriate level of evidence before recommendation or handover

Strategic Alignment, Governance & Stakeholder Leadership

• Partner closely with business, digital, data, science, technology, and subject-matter stakeholders to identify needs, shape opportunity spaces, and validate potential concepts
• Act as the point of contact for assigned innovation landscapes or concentration areas, maintaining clarity and continuity throughout discovery and validation
• Contribute to governance and portfolio reviews, ensuring discovery activity is prioritized effectively, and decisions are grounded in evidence
• Represent the team in leadership forums and escalate decisions, risks, dependencies, and resource constraints as needed
• Apply broad innovation knowledge in a global business context, integrating cross-functional and cross-market perspectives to strengthen opportunity discovery and validation decisions

Team Leadership & Capability Development

• Lead, develop, and coach team members, creating clarity on discovery priorities, expectations, accountability, and performance
• Set direction across multiple opportunities and team members, ensuring strong alignment to strategic priorities and consistent application of the innovation process
• Allocate resources and leadership attention across the portfolio to maintain focus on the highest-value learning and validation work
• Build capability across the team by strengthening discovery methods, opportunity framing, experimentation, evidence quality, stakeholder management, and decision discipline
• Support succession, development, and workforce planning within the team

Education & Experience Requirements:

• Bachelor's degree in business, science, technology, engineering, or a related field. Advanced degree (MBA, MS) preferred.
• Previous experience leading innovation, strategy, discovery, research, or consulting roles within a complex global organization that provides the knowledge, skills, and abilities to perform the job (comparable to 8-10 years' experience)
• Demonstrated experience owning and prioritizing a portfolio of discovery, experimentation, or concept-validation activities
• Proven ability to translate strategic priorities into focused opportunity spaces, learning agendas, and evidence-based recommendations
• Experience leading teams and developing capability across multiple levels
• Strong analytical, strategic, and systems-thinking capabilities
• Executive-level stakeholder engagement, influencing, and decision-support skills
• Experience progressing opportunities from early exploration through structured concept validation and decision readiness
• In some cases, an equivalency, consisting of appropriate education, training, and/or directly related experience will be considered sufficient for an individual to meet the requirements of the role.

Preferred

• Clinical Research or pharmaceutical industry experience preferred.
• Familiarity with experimentation, hypothesis-driven innovation, customer or user research, concept testing, and evidence-based portfolio decisions
• Experience working across multiple markets, business units, or geographies
• Awareness of emerging technologies, industry trends, evolving customer needs, and new business models

Skills

• Portfolio leadership: Ability to create coherence across a broad discovery landscape and focus resources on the most important opportunity and learning priorities
• Strategic translation: Ability to convert strategic priorities into clear opportunity spaces, discovery questions, validation plans, and decision criteria
• Opportunity discovery: Strong capability in identifying, framing, shaping, and validating high-potential opportunities and concepts
• Experimentation leadership: Ability to identify critical assumptions and guide proportionate experiments that reduce uncertainty efficiently
• Evidence-based decision-making: Confidence making and guiding stop, pivot, continue, or handover recommendations under uncertainty
• People leadership: Ability to set direction, coach performance, build capability, and develop a strong innovation team
• Stakeholder influence: Effective engagement with senior and executive stakeholders across functions, markets, and specialist disciplines
• Systems thinking: Ability to identify patterns, connections, dependencies, risks, and opportunity spaces across a complex global landscape

At Thermo Fisher Scientific, we are committed to fostering a healthy and harmonious workplace for our employees. We understand the importance of creating an environment that allows individuals to excel. Please see below for the required qualifications for this position, which also includes the possibility of equivalent experience:

• Able to communicate, receive, and understand information and ideas with diverse groups of people in a comprehensible and reasonable manner.
• Able to work upright and stationary for typical working hours.
• Ability to use and learn standard office equipment and technology with proficiency.
• Able to perform successfully under pressure while prioritizing and handling multiple projects or activities.
• May require as-needed travel (0-20%) domestic and international.

Location: Remote Brazil or Mexico. Relocation assistance is NOT provided. *Must be legally authorized to work in your country of residence without sponsorship. *Must be able to pass a comprehensive background check