Senior Manager, Innovation Partnerships in Vancouver

The Senior Manager, Innovation Partnerships—Clean Energy, Critical Minerals and Mining is a senior business development and partnership architecture role within Innovation UBC. The role focuses on clean energy, critical minerals and mining, 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.

The role is accountable for generating and advancing opportunities that convert UBC research strengths, innovation assets, talent, intellectual property, and facilities into strategically significant, externally funded collaborations that deliver measurable research, innovation, economic, environmental, health, and societal impact. This position is focused on complex and multi-faceted public-private partnership opportunities, including multi-party research consortia, anchor partner relationships, challenge-based initiatives, and major strategic alliances.

The Senior Manager 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. 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.

Organizational Status: Internal. Reports directly to the Associate Director, Innovation Partnerships, and has a dotted line reporting relationship to the Associate Dean, Research and Graduate Studies, Faculty of Applied Science. Works closely with Innovation UBC Sponsored Research, Technology Transfer, Entrepreneurship, and other Innovation UBC colleagues to ensure external partners receive coordinated and coherent outreach and responses.

Key Responsibilities:

• Contributes to the development and execution of Innovation UBC's partnerships strategy, annual work plan, and strategic opportunity pipeline.
• Independently identifies and generates new partnership opportunities for review, prioritization, and direction by the Associate Director.
• Identifies areas where UBC research strengths, facilities, intellectual property, entrepreneurial capacity, and student talent can be combined into compelling value propositions for external partners.
• Undertakes proactive external market discovery and environmental scanning to identify major industry needs, government priorities, funding opportunities, consortia models, and public/private innovation programs beyond recurring transactional mechanisms.
• Develops opportunity briefs, partner value propositions, prospect strategies, and internal decision materials for high-potential strategic initiatives.
• Builds, deepens, and manages relationships with external partners capable of supporting major research and innovation collaborations with UBC.
• Drives assigned partnership initiatives toward completion, coordinating internal and external contributors, maintaining momentum, managing timelines, and providing regular progress updates to the Associate Director.
• Designs and advances complex, multi-party, multi-year partnership structures, including research consortia, anchor industry partnerships, public-private initiatives, innovation hubs, challenge-based collaborations, and strategic alliances.
• Develops and maintains relationships with UBC researchers, research clusters, institutes, centres, and academic leaders whose work aligns with major external partnership opportunities.
• Maintains accurate records of opportunities, contacts, engagement activities, pipeline stages, risks, next steps, and outcomes using the systems and reporting tools adopted by Innovation UBC.

Minimum Qualifications: Undergraduate degree in a relevant discipline. Minimum of nine years of related experience in a senior management position, or the equivalent combination of education and experience.

Preferred Qualifications: Graduate degree in science, engineering, health, business, law, public policy, or another relevant field, or an equivalent professional designation. Proven track record creating or materially advancing complex, high-value, multi-party public-private partnerships, research consortia, strategic alliances, or innovation initiatives.