Innovation Catalyst — ETH Zürich

Full description

Innovation Catalyst

60%-80%, Zurich, fixed-term

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At the ETH Student Project House (SPH) we inspire and empower students to cultivate a mindset of makers and innovators. We believe that by exploring their ideas and developing their own projects, students gain valuable hands-on experience and learn important skills for their future. This is why we’ve created an ecosystem where students (Bachelor, Master, and Doctoral students) are encouraged to explore, ideate, build prototypes, test and refine them.

Our interdisciplinary team of thirty people provides students who want to pursue extracurricular projects of various types and scales with a comprehensive range of support. On the one hand, we design and manage facilities like co-working, ideation, and event spaces as well as a makerspace that gives students access to the tools and equipment they need to prototype. On the other hand, we support project teams with personal coaching, workshops, and a diverse expert network. We want to accompany students on their journey by inspiring them to get started, to seek diverse views, to explore the real need behind an idea, to work as a team, to think big, to fail, to pivot, and to keep overcoming obstacles they encounter on the way.

We’re now looking for an Innovation Catalyst to join our team on a fixed-term maternity cover (for 5-6 months), with the possibility of extension.

Application Deadline: please apply before Friday, 17th of July, 9am.

Project background

You’ll work in one of the most inspiring spaces at ETH Zürich, surrounded by 3D-printers, whiteboards, ideation equipment, self-designed furniture, and plants.

• We’re located on the ETH Zentrum and ETH Hönggerberg campuses.
• We work in the same open space as our project teams and meet with everyone at eye level. The individuals we work with are from a diverse range of backgrounds and study disciplines, which is why we communicate in English.
• While a majority of our service offers run during the day, the projects we support are extracurricular, so most of our events and workshops take place in the late afternoon, sometimes in the evening, and occasionally on weekends.
• We take an agile approach to conceptualizing and delivering our offer and allocate our capacity flexibly to the most important tasks. Hereby, teamwork is one of our key values.
• You’ll be part of the project support subteam of 6 people that supports the “coached projects”. These projects are very diverse regarding topic, stage, intensity and goal. Some of them are entrepreneurial, others have another focus such as founding an NGO, a club, or participating a university competition. Currently we support more than 600 coached projects per year.

Job description

Together, we support the projects, in the fields of innovation and personal growth. In the role of an Innovation Catalyst, you are responsible for the following tasks:

• Coaching: You’ll coach early-stage projects from diverse backgrounds. You’ll help them to reflect, ask insightful questions, and support them to pin down their next steps, without taking on a leadership role.
• Conceptualizing and Managing: You’ll develop learning journeys and service offers to support our students from start to finish. This includes conceptualizing, testing, and building end-to-end processes, as well as documenting, running, continuously improving, and scaling these offers.
• Facilitating: You’ll facilitate workshops (e.g. ideation, need-finding), moderate expert training (e.g. business models, patents), or host peer-to-peer events.
• Driving: You'll lead key initiatives aligned with SPH's mission, including stakeholder management

In the Project Support team, we practice collegial management, sharing both leadership and accountability.

Profile

We need your energy and drive to support our projects, scale, and develop our offer to the next level.

• You have experience