What are the responsibilities and job description for the Vice President Innovation position at Silgan Dispensing?
Mission
Drive revenue and earnings growth by ensuring the company is seen by customers as the industry leader partner for new product development and innovation.
Key Deliverables
- Lead and drive timely execution of the company’s innovation pipeline to meet SDS growth and profitability goals.
- Collaborate with Marketing to identify and develop new features and enhancement options for existing products.
- Build a high-performance engineering team with diverse expertise in a range of technologies and applications. Provide leadership and guidance to the team while building a culture of collaboration and continuous improvement.
- Redesign the innovation process to reflect customer and market dynamics: Enhance the process to accelerate and strengthen the design brief; Drive deeper engagement with customers to more quickly align on targeted performance; develop more accurate predictive testing; outline a faster approach to prototyping; and, accelerate overall product development.
- Engage and drive alignment with customers on priority projects.
- Engage with suppliers to better leverage their innovation capabilities and resources
- Strengthen innovation governance model to more fully leverage all SDS resources and create better alignment between innovation and business strategy
- In collaboration with SDS Leadership, Marketing and our customers, constantly refresh the SDS innovation agenda.
Required Knowledge, Skills and Approach
- Advanced degree in Packaging Engineering or related field
- 10 years of experience developing liquid dispensing products
- Material Science knowledge
- Understanding of Injection Molding
- Knowledge of dispensing markets and applications and a proven track-record of collaboration to bring new products to market. Knowledge of CPG customers development processes and requirements is preferred
- Knowledge of Sustainability trends and the implications for product development & product performance
- Disciplined approach to project management with excellent skills at leading cross-functional teams through accelerated brief development processes through each stage of the stage gate process.
- Understanding of financial metrics and business case development
- Passion and sense of urgency to bring projects to a successful commercialization
- Strong analytical & problem-solving skills
- Comfort with being a challenging partner
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills
- Continuous improvement mindset
- Exceptional leadership & collaboration skills: A global orientation with the ability to lead across cultures
