Head of R&D Digital Business Innovation

Key Responsibilities

Digital Business Innovation & Strategy

• Identify and prioritize high-value opportunities to transform R&D workflows, operating practices, and decision-making through AI and digital capabilities.
• Challenge legacy processes and assumptions, focusing on what should fundamentally change rather than simply digitizing how work is performed today.
• Translate business challenges into a focused portfolio of innovation initiatives with clear outcomes, priorities, and value hypotheses.
• Lead selected cross-functional initiatives from opportunity identification through implementation, scaling, and value realization.

AI-Native Workflow Innovation

• Reimagine end-to-end R&D workflows from first principles, using AI, intelligent agents, automation, and data to fundamentally rethink how work gets done.
• Determine where work can be eliminated, simplified, automated, augmented, or redesigned, and define the optimal interaction between human expertise and AI.
• Explore AI-native and agentic approaches that reduce manual work, handoffs, information synthesis, and coordination while enabling faster and higher-quality decisions.
• Rapidly test new concepts through experiments, prototypes, and proofs of value, using evidence to determine what to scale, redesign, or stop.
• Define appropriate human oversight, decision rights, accountability, and controls for AI-enabled workflows, particularly in scientific, medical, quality, and regulated activities.

Business Transformation & New Ways of Working

• Partner with R&D leaders to translate AI-native workflow designs into sustainable changes in processes, roles, skills, behaviors, decision rights, and operating practices.
• Enable teams to move beyond using AI for individual tasks toward integrated AI-enabled ways of working embedded in day-to-day workflows and decisions.
• Build stakeholder ownership, trust, and readiness for new ways of working, addressing barriers to adoption and change.
• Establish feedback and learning mechanisms to continuously improve workflows, user experience, and business effectiveness.

Cross-Functional Leadership & Partnership

• Serve as a senior innovation partner to R&D leaders, bringing AI-native thinking, external perspective, and constructive challenge to business opportunities.
• Partner closely with Digital & AI Product Management, Data Science, Technology, and functional teams to translate business opportunities into scalable solutions and new operating practices.
• Lead the business transformation dimension of digital and AI initiatives, including opportunity definition, workflow redesign, business adoption, and value realization.
• Influence senior stakeholders, align diverse perspectives, accelerate decisions, and remove barriers to innovation.
• Foster a culture of curiosity, experimentation, continuous learning, and willingness to challenge established ways of working.

Business Impact & Scalable Innovation

• Define measurable business outcomes and value hypotheses for innovation initiatives, supported by clear performance baselines and targets.
• Measure impact across areas such as cycle time, productivity, quality, cost, user experience, and decision effectiveness.
• Identify and address barriers when expected business value is not being realized.
• Scale successful innovations across R&D functions and geographies where they can create broader value.
• Develop repeatable approaches and playbooks for AI-native workflow innovation, adoption, scaling, and value realization.

Qualifications and Experience

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in business, science, engineering, technology, or a related field and 14+ years of relevant experience; advanced degree and 10+ years of relevant experience preferred.
• Significant experience leading complex business innovation, transformation, process redesign, digital initiatives, or organizational change in a global, matrixed organization.
• Demonstrated ability to think AI-natively and redesign workflows from first principles, rather than simply applying technology to existing processes.
• Demonstrated track record of challenging established practices and delivering measurable improvements in business performance.
• Experience taking innovation from opportunity identification and experimentation through implementation, adoption, scaling, and value realization.
• Strong understanding of the capabilities and limitations of generative AI, intelligent agents, automation, and data-driven decision support, with the ability to translate them into practical business opportunities.
• Strong strategic and systems thinking, problem-solving, stakeholder engagement, and execution capabilities.
• Proven ability to influence senior leaders, navigate ambiguity and resistance, and mobilize cross-functional teams across organizational boundaries.
• Intellectual curiosity and a commitment to continuously understanding emerging AI capabilities and their implications for how R&D work can be performed.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in pharmaceutical, biotechnology, healthcare, or another complex, knowledge-intensive and regulated industry.
• Strong understanding of pharmaceutical R&D processes, with experience in Clinical Operations highly desirable.
• Experience applying generative AI, agentic AI, intelligent automation, advanced analytics, or emerging technologies to business workflows.
• Familiarity with process redesign, human-centered design, experimentation, agile ways of working, or digital product development.
• Experience working across global and culturally diverse organizations.