Senior Manager - UBC, Vancouver

Position summary

The Senior Manager, Innovation Partnerships—Defense, Cybersecurity and Dual Use Technologies is a senior business development and partnership architecture role within Innovation UBC. The role focuses on defense, cybersecurity and dual use technologies, and advances partnerships in other industries by drawing on research strengths across the University.

Reporting to the Associate Director, Innovation Partnerships, with dotted line reporting to the Associate Dean, Research and Graduate Studies, Faculty of Applied Science, the incumbent initiates, develops, structures, negotiates within delegated authority, and advances high-value partnerships with industry, government, not-for-profit organizations, foundations, and other external partners.

Skills and experience

The successful candidate applies scientific and/or technical fluency, business acumen, senior relationship management, opportunity qualification, and knowledge of sponsored research, technology transfer, commercialization, entrepreneurship, and public/private innovation funding models to create collaborations that are larger in scope, longer in duration, and more strategically important than incremental project-by-project research contracts.

What you'll do

The Senior Manager is expected to independently generate opportunities for review, lead assigned initiatives, and drive them to completion with regular progress check-ins and direction from the Associate Director. Core responsibilities include:

• Contribute to the development and execution of Innovation UBC's partnerships strategy, annual work plan, and strategic opportunity pipeline.
• Independently identify and generate new partnership opportunities for review, prioritization, and direction by the Associate Director.
• Identify areas where UBC research strengths, facilities, intellectual property, entrepreneurial capacity, and student talent can be combined into compelling value propositions for external partners.
• Build, deepen, and manage relationships with external partners capable of supporting major research and innovation collaborations with UBC.
• Design and advance complex, multi-party, multi-year partnership structures, including research consortia, anchor industry partnerships, public-private initiatives, innovation hubs, challenge-based collaborations, and strategic alliances.
• Develop and maintain relationships with UBC researchers, research clusters, institutes, centres, and academic leaders whose work aligns with major external partnership opportunities.
• Maintain accurate records of opportunities, contacts, engagement activities, pipeline stages, risks, next steps, and outcomes using the systems and reporting tools adopted by Innovation UBC.
• Represent Innovation UBC in meetings, conferences, sector forums, government and industry roundtables, and other venues related to university-industry-government collaboration and innovation.