Innovation Community Specialist

• Initiate and facilitate activities that enable community building and sharing across Country Offices;
• Convene stakeholders across themes to demonstrate the power of the network and generate new learnings which are relevant to UNDP;
• Enable connections between different teams for increased coherence;
• Drive concerted effort to demonstrate shift from niche efforts into larger integrated efforts at institutional level;
• Design and facilitate collective learning activities stressing on common yet complex challenges across Country Offices across the region;
• Engage external partners to bring new perspectives on specific development challenges;
• Liaise, share and seek opportunities for synergy in community development and learning with the Global Accelerator Lab, Strategic Innovation Unit and Chief Digital Office teams, whenever relevant.

Codifying and Socialising Learning  

• Lead on bringing together systems innovation, digital and Accelerator Lab teams among others for intelligence generation and sharing;
• Identify patterns, and glean valuable insights from strategic innovation and digitalization across the region;
• Jointly with Strategic Learning and Visual Designer to turn insights into compelling knowledge products on emerging development challenges;
• Jointly with Strategic Innovation Designer, develop increased coherence in approaches and their uptake across the community;
• Jointly with the Strategic Learning and Visual Designer develop creative ways to socialize our knowledge in order to inspire action and inform decision making;
• Proactively use blog posts and social media to share insights, attract partners and help position UNDP’s work on innovation and digital;
• Work out loud in an effort to share learnings to the broader strategic innovation community, create potential engagement opportunities.

Horizon Scanning of Trends and Opportunities    

• Identity and document emerging development trends, with a particular focus on the edges and “below the radar screen” events and players, and systemically map their impacts on the economy, society, and livelihood;
• Proactively explore and identify the new methods/approaches and frontier knowledge to tackle development challenges against the background of Circular Economy, Future of Work, Youth, Digital Stacks, Public Infrastructure and Goods, Future of Governance to inform Regional Innovation Team’s agenda;
• Contribute to the formulation of the new service lines and development priorities based on findings from the horizon scanning, systems mapping, and demands from clients such as governments/CSOs/foundations  and UNDP country offices;
• Map potential partners across the public and private sectors with versatile expertise to strengthen Regional Innovation Team’s capacity in service delivery; thereby expanding the distributed network of the team at the regional and global level;
• Help embed a culture of horizon scanning and attention for the “edges” in country offices and partner governments.;
• Support the implementation of the broader research and innovation agenda.
• Provide other support as needed. 

• Achieve Results: LEVEL 3: Set and align challenging, achievable objectives for multiple projects, have lasting impact 
• Think Innovatively: LEVEL 3: Proactively mitigate potential risks, develop new ideas to solve complex problems 
• Learn Continuously: LEVEL 3: Create and act on opportunities to expand horizons, diversify experiences
• Adapt with Agility: LEVEL 3: Proactively initiate and champion change, manage multiple competing demands 
• Act with Determination: LEVEL 3: Think beyond immediate task/barriers and take action to achieve greater results
• Engage and Partner: LEVEL 3: Political savvy, navigate complex landscape, champion inter-agency collaboration
• Enable Diversity and Inclusion:   LEVEL 3: Appreciate benefits of diverse workforce and champion inclusivity

Cross-Functional & Technical competencies 

Business Management   

• Customer Satisfaction/Client Management: Ability to respond timely and appropriately with a sense of urgency, provide consistent solutions, and deliver timely and quality results and/or solutions to fulfill and understand the real customers’ needs. Provide inputs to the development of customer service strategy. Look for ways to add value beyond clients’ immediate requests. Ability to anticipate client’s upcoming needs and concerns.

Digital & Innovation 

• Collective Intelligence Design: Ability to bringing together diverse groups of people, data, information or ideas, and technology to design services or solutions.
• Co-creation: Ability to design and facilitate a process that enables a diverse group of stakeholders to solve a common problem, develop a practice, or create knowledge together. 
• Creative facilitation: Ability to design workshops that considers and addresses multiple interests, agendas, worldviews; set out clear objectives and engaging activities; select appropriate tools, materials, resources that are needed to enable or support the activities; Ability to swiftly build rapport with participants and create a safe space (on- and offline) where they feel comfortable to share their views, concerns, experiences and reflections; supporting this with a range of tools to stimulate active participation.
• Sensemaking: Being curious about "what's going on?" in the world or direct business environment, grasp 'thick data', separate signals from noise, adopt new frames to identify (non-obvious) patterns; Ability to facilitate group reflection and induce collective learning to extract meaning from experiences; socialise these insights to inform problem solving, decision making, strategic planning or future work; Ability to share and disseminate new perspectives or understandings influencing how key stakeholders socially construct meaning. 
• Storytelling: Ability to empathise with people's perceptions, motivations, feelings and mental models and craft narratives to build an emotive argument for change accordingly; Ability to present data, insights or information in compelling ways to mobilise resources, talent or action; Ability to choose media and channels that is fit for purpose to reach specific target audiences. 

Business Development

• Knowledge Generation: Ability to research and turn information into useful knowledge, relevant for context, or responsive to a stated need.