Senior Innovation Manager - Consumer Electronics

Our client, a leading global consumer electronics brand, is seeking a Senior Innovation Manager to join its Shanghai office. The ideal candidate will have a proven track record in innovation, advanced concepts, or product development within the consumer electronics industry.

Responsibilities

• Lead Innovation Development: Own the innovation pipeline for the China market, from identifying emerging opportunities and defining concepts through prototyping, validation, and incorporation into the broader product and business roadmap.
• Market & Technology Intelligence: Monitor emerging technologies, consumer behaviors, user needs, and market developments relevant to personal workspaces in China. Develop clear insights and perspectives to shape innovation priorities and business direction.
• Opportunity Identification & Strategic Influence: Proactively identify new opportunities and emerging signals before they become mainstream. Build compelling business cases and narratives that enable senior leadership to make timely, informed decisions.
• Concept Creation & Rapid Prototyping: Facilitate design-thinking workshops and innovation sprints to explore new ideas and solutions. Turn complex technologies and concepts into tangible prototypes, visual concepts, and clear recommendations.
• Cross-Functional Leadership: Bring together designers, engineers, product managers, marketing, and other stakeholders to align on opportunities, priorities, and execution. Drive collaboration from early-stage ideas through to validated concepts.
• External Innovation Network: Develop relationships with startups, universities, research organizations, technology companies, and other innovation ecosystems to identify new technologies, capabilities, and perspectives.
• Insight & Data Management: Develop effective approaches to technology scouting, trend analysis, opportunity mapping, and data tracking. Use data, insights, and AI-enabled tools to improve the quality and speed of strategic decision-making.
• Innovation Governance & Execution: Facilitate roadmap discussions, innovation reviews, ideation workshops, and post-launch assessments. Track outcomes, identify learnings, and continuously improve the innovation process.

Qualifications & Competencies

• Relevant Experience: 5–10 years of experience in innovation, advanced concepts, product development, product management, strategy, or a related field, ideally within consumer electronics, consumer hardware, or technology.
• Innovation Track Record: Proven experience taking innovative ideas from early-stage concepts through development and, ideally, to successful market launch. Demonstrated ability to translate innovation into tangible business or customer impact.
• Strategic Communication & Influence: Strong verbal and visual communication skills, with the ability to make complex technologies and emerging trends easy to understand and compelling to different audiences. Comfortable influencing senior stakeholders and advocating for new opportunities.
• Prototyping & Technical Capability: Hands-on experience with prototyping, design thinking, and concept development. Familiarity with system-level thinking, technical schematics, solution architecture, and other tools used to communicate and test new concepts. Demonstrated ability to use AI tools effectively to accelerate research, ideation, prototyping, and strategic analysis.
• Leadership & Facilitation: Strong experience leading cross-functional teams, innovation workshops, ideation sessions, and roadmap discussions. Able to create alignment among diverse stakeholders and move teams from ideas to actionable outcomes.
• Personal Attributes: Curious, pragmatic, entrepreneurial, and highly execution-oriented. Comfortable operating in ambiguous and fast-changing environments, with a strong focus on user needs and commercial outcomes. A hands-on “ show, don’t tell ” approach, with the ability to turn emerging ideas into tangible concepts and recommendations.
• Language Skills: Fluent in both Mandarin and English.