Innovation Lab Director

Summary

Join ACE's Better Lab as the founding Innovation Lab Director, building and leading a team to drive innovation across the organization. You will develop and implement innovative methodologies, facilitate workshops, and lead experiments to enhance program impact and operational efficiency. The role involves recruiting and managing a small team, teaching design thinking, and collaborating with various teams to identify and execute high-impact projects. You will report to the CEO and work closely with a board member as a mentor. Success will be measured by cost savings, increased income, improved staff satisfaction, and the development of scalable programs. The position is remote, based in the US, and requires occasional travel.

Requirements

• 8+ years of professional experience with team leadership
• Background in design thinking and/or organizational change
• Track record of facilitating breakthrough creative outcomes
• 4+ years of professional experience in taking digital products from conception to go-to-market strategy and launch
• Ability to rapidly prototype, getting your hands dirty, learning what you don’t know and quickly hiring contractors for what you can’t learn
• Finding what you need off-the-shelf and building what doesn’t yet exist to fill the gaps
• Experience in designing and launching marketing campaigns using the latest and most effective tools
• Collaborative but Decisive: You build consensus AND have the backbone to champion bold ideas and kill weak ones
• Culture Creator: You understand how complex organizations work and how to create the culture change that necessarily precedes operational change
• Leadership & Team Building: You've managed people and have experience recruiting and building small teams
• Curiosity and Learning: You are a polymath, a constant learner, and always curious. Your knowledge and experience spans cultures, geographies, domains, technologies and identities
• Teacher & Doer: You can facilitate workshops that build capability while also executing complex experiments yourself
• Tech-Savvy: You spot opportunities where emerging technologies could enhance our work and quickly try out new tools
• Mission-Aligned: You care about climate, civic engagement and social change (non-profit experience helpful but not required)
• Ego-Free Experimenter: Once an experiment is chosen, you move fast, build lean, and generate real signals without letting politics getting in the way

Responsibilities

• Build and Lead Team
• Recruit and manage team members (2-3 to start, including project managers and a multi-disciplinary researcher)
• Develop innovation methodologies and common language for the lab team and larger organization
• Create clear roles and processes that maximize team creativity, efficiency and impact
• Build Innovation Culture
• Design and facilitate bi-monthly innovation workshops for all staff
• Teach teams how to frame challenges as "How might we..?" questions that lead to lean experiments
• Create rotating fellowship programs that turn staff members into innovation champions
• Develop internal learning systems to keep teams ahead of trends in AI, politics, and culture
• Lead Bold Experiments
• Collaborate with every team to identify high-impact opportunities for innovation
• Design lean, fast-moving experiments that generate real signals without getting bogged down in bureaucracy
• Coordinate with our in-house research team on experiment design
• Manage a portfolio of speculative projects with balanced risk levels
• Run organization-wide hack-a-thons to identify and fund frontier programs
• Make tough calls on which experiments to kill, scale, or pivot
• Drive Operational Excellence
• Partner with teams to streamline operations and identify AI/automation opportunities
• Design research projects that answer critical strategic questions teams don't have time to explore
• Evaluate experimental results independently and push for implementation of winning approaches
• Build external reputation for ACE as an innovation leader in comms, clean energy and civic engagement
• Tell our story to funders and partners, ensuring we’re seen as one of the most innovative organizations in the world

Benefits

• Medical, Dental, Vision
• 403b retirement savings plan
• Vacation
• Sabbatical
• Paid Parental Leave
• 2 Floating Holidays
• 2 Community Service Floating Holidays
• Sick time
• Two weeks of full-staff time off (July 4 week and Christmas-New Year's week)
• 13 observed holidays