Business Growth & Inception Lead

Description

As a Business Growth & Inception Lead within Global Innovation, you will co-lead early-stage concept discovery and inception to accelerate GM growth businesses and provide strategic support throughout the lifecycle of our internal startups from Ideation to Enterprise Integration. This is a Fortune 50 intrapreneurial role, requiring a bias to action, strategic mindset, excellent internal stakeholder engagement skills, non-linear judgment, deep comfort with ambiguity and substantial experience with coarse decision-making.

Adopting startup ‘co-founder’ philosophy, you will co-lead the core incubation of early problem discovery to fuel GM growth opportunities by writing lean canvas business models that address early customer desirability, technical feasibility, and commercial viability. As a core member of the Global Innovation Ideation team, you will contribute to sourcing the top-of-funnel innovation portfolio by fostering innovation opportunities with internal business unit partners, harvesting our internal Bright Ideas ideation platform, and strategically engaging with the external technology ecosystem.

You will also partner closely with the Global Innovation DEFINE team to scope and test initial prototypes once early concepts are approved by leadership. As startups move through the Global Innovation funnel, you will serve as a customer desirability subject matter expert and advise on product-market fit, MVP strategy, hypothesis tree validation and initial go/no-go investment milestones. Additionally, you will need to stay apprised of GM’s corporate strategic TAM pillars, proprietary IP assets, R&D initiatives, relevant macro trends, disruptive technologies, and the Enterprise Innovation Portfolio to inform our core incubation efforts.

What you'll do

• Co-lead early-stage problem discovery, opportunity analysis and concept definition
• For each project, within time-boxed constraints, you will:
• Conduct grass-roots customer empathy and initial market research using interviews, focus groups, surveys, and secondary sources leveraging existing insights whenever possible.
• Define initial customer persona and problem hypotheses using human-centered design principles.
• Design and deploy low-fidelity hypothesis testing to rapidly validate, iterate and generate critical insights that refine the customer definition and pain/gain/unmet opportunity spectrum.
• Conduct SAM market sizing and build simplified financial models with ranged scenarios that justifies an investment thesis.
• Write stress-tested business model lean canvasses for each recommended opportunity.
• Build relationships and partner with GM Business Units across the enterprise to gain early stakeholder buy-in for new concepts and line of business growth acceleration.
• Partner with Global Innovation's executive leadership to perform go/no-go analyses related to Global Innovation's project portfolio
• Evaluate and source new ideas through proactive internal fostering and external innovation scouting
• Exhibit courage and objectivity to ascertain when an idea is not worth pursuing and take action to pause or pivot

Requirements:

• Bachelor's degree but MBA preferred
• 5+ years in growth strategy/innovation consulting, enterprise innovation, or corporate strategy/development with automotive or digital business focus.
• Hands-on experience with customer empathy research and low-fidelity hypothesis-based testing leading to synthesized insights, lean canvas development and a startup pitch or corporate activation
• Excellent relationship building and communication skills, as this role requires critical cross-functional collaboration with internal GM line of business leaders and efficient external engagement with our ecosystem
• Experience working with senior leaders in large organizations and demonstrated ability to influence, cross-functionally align and partner leading to new initiative activation
• Experience owning a corporate P&L or defined outcomes and driving to results using experimentation and collaborative learning is a strong plus
• Ability to travel 20%

GM DOES NOT PROVIDE IMMIGRATION-RELATED SPONSORSHIP FOR THIS ROLE. DO NOT APPLY FOR THIS ROLE IF YOU WILL NEED GM IMMIGRATION SPONSORSHIP (e.g., H-1B, TN, STEM OPT, etc.) NOW OR IN THE FUTURE.

Additional Description

About GM

Our vision is a world with Zero Crashes, Zero Emissions and Zero Congestion and we embrace the responsibility to lead the change that will make our world better, safer and more equitable for all.

Why Join Us 

We aspire to be the most inclusive company in the world. We believe we all must make a choice every day – individually and collectively – to drive meaningful change through our words, our deeds and our culture. Our Work Appropriately philosophy supports our foundation of inclusion and provides employees the flexibility to work where they can have the greatest impact on achieving our goals, dependent on role needs. Every day, we want every employee, no matter their background, ethnicity, preferences, or location, to feel they belong to one General Motors team.

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Diversity Information

General Motors is committed to being a workplace that is not only free of discrimination, but one that genuinely fosters inclusion and belonging. We strongly believe that workforce diversity creates an environment in which our employees can thrive and develop better products for our customers.   We understand and embrace the variety through which people gain experiences whether through professional, personal, educational, or volunteer opportunities. GM is proud to be an equal opportunity employer.

Equal Employment Opportunity Statements

The policy of General Motors is to extend opportunities to qualified applicants and employees on an equal basis regardless of an individual's age, race, color, sex, religion, national origin, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression or veteran status. Additionally, General Motors is committed to being an Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) Employer and offers opportunities to all job seekers including individuals with disabilities. If you need a reasonable accommodation to assist with your job search or application for employment, email us at Careers.Accommodations@GM.com or call us at 800-865-7580. In your email, please include a description of the specific accommodation you are requesting as well as the job title and requisition number of the position for which you are applying.