What Does An Innovation Consultant Do?

WHAT DOES AN INNOVATION CONSULTANT DO?

Published: Sep 08, 2025 - The Innovation Consultant works closely with corporate partners, startup ecosystems, and innovation teams to co-design and deliver impactful innovation programs and business transformation initiatives. This role guides product and innovation teams through agile development phases, identifies new opportunities, and turns them into measurable business value through coaching, mentoring, and strategic facilitation. The consultant also supports account strategy, nurtures long-term partnerships, develops compelling client solutions, and contributes to team growth through coaching and talent acquisition.

A Review of Professional Skills and Functions for Innovation Consultant

1. Digital Innovation Consultant Duties

Research Analysis: Conduct primary and secondary research on new healthcare innovations to develop opinions on the commercial potential of an idea
Business Planning: Build business plans for ideas and inventions, including analysis of the market opportunity, solution or use cases, competitive landscape, workflow or implementation requirements, financial requirements for growth and more
Project Evaluation: Support projects to evaluate, refine and advance innovative ideas with strong commercial potential and the capability to scale across the organization
Product Prioritization: Support prioritization of organizational pain points, source, vet and facilitate the build or selection of digital health products to address those pain points
Team Support: Support project or product teams and play a lead role in the creation of deliverables
Innovation Delivery: Support delivery of innovation services, including ideation, education, experience design, prototyping, business planning, market analysis, solution sourcing, product development, pilots and more
Process Development: Support the creation of core processes and procedures to operationalize digital innovation by leveraging repeatable frameworks
Program Implementation: Implement and execute innovation activities related to programs designed to engage and source startups
Stakeholder Management: Liaise with relevant internal and external stakeholders to manage weekly tasks, drive planning and progress, coordinate preparation and follow-up actions to keep projects on track, jumping in to move things forward
Progress Tracking: Track, analyze and report progress related to key program milestones and support the tactful resolution of issues as they arise

2. Innovation Consultant Responsibilities

Campaign Execution: Support execution of highly engaging marketing campaigns that increase program awareness, energize the community and encourage participation in digital innovation, continuously assess the effectiveness of marketing tactics and course-correct
Content Strategy: Collaborate with institutional partners to conceive content or collateral strategy, provide copywriting support, ensure dissemination of materials and maximize impact of content distribution with various formats and channels
Marketing Strategy: Define and execute digital innovation’s marketing and communications strategy with a well-defined voice and strategic marketing activities ranging from managing social media presence to organizing outreach activities to crafting newsletter messaging
Asset Management: Create and maintain marketing assets, including one-pagers, executive summaries, decks, digital signage and online presence
Thought Leadership: Research and produce digital health thought leadership content with oversight from leadership, conclude research to recommend positioning for opinion-driven content
Community Building: Cultivate a community and culture of innovation by continuously getting to know clinicians, scientists, leaders and industry experts
Relationship Management: Build cross-functional relationships with key partners across the organization to better understand how digital innovation can help clinicians, researchers and leaders innovate faster
Event Planning: Provide strategic planning and manage on-the-ground operations of events and major ecosystem engagement efforts (i.e., hackathons, crowdsourcing campaigns, shark tanks, community events, speaker series, etc.)
Tool Development: Support development and implementation of innovation tools and workshops (e.g., value proposition, jobs to be done, go-to-market strategy, risk assessment, etc.)
Event Representation: Attend events and conferences and be able to clearly articulate digital innovation efforts and service offerings and share learnings with the team

3. Senior Innovation Consultant Accountabilities

Workshop Facilitation: Facilitate design thinking workshops across innovation, data and technology-focused projects for a variety of clients
Knowledge Management: Establish a strong knowledge base from which to draw on to support the customer experience strategy development and recommendations
Stakeholder Engagement: Conduct stakeholder interviews to understand internal client needs
Journey Mapping: Understand the moments that matter across the customer journey
Persona Design: Design personas and map customer journeys
Prototype Testing: Facilitate and oversee prototype development and user testing
Insight Development: Gather data-driven insights, develop recommendations and build a roadmap of initiatives for clients
Solution Delivery: Work alongside the UX or UI and tech development team to deliver proposed solutions
Proposal Development: Assist in the development of proposals for innovation and experience design thinking projects in conjunction with the business development team

4. Innovation Consultant Functions

Relationship Building: Develop C-suite and line of business relationships within the customer organization
Sales Support: Support sales and account teams in scoping and delivering complex innovation programmes
Enablement Management: Support sales and delivery enablement within EMEA, and manage key professional services stakeholders
Program Leadership: Lead workshops and deliver programs covering broad areas such as ideation, digital ecosystems, value streams, product management and product operating models
Best Practices: Evangelise and lead best practice, develop new materials, intellectual property and methodologies
Industry Transformation: Work across multiple industry verticals to solve pressing transformation challenges
Change Leadership: Lead customers through change to become more customer-centric and provide direction and clarity through in-depth analysis and recommendations and deliver roadmaps for change
Practice Representation: Represent best practices around innovation, product management, customer experience and cloud and help develop and improve the execution model based on engagement experience
Community Growth: Help grow the innovation community of practice by leading practice-building activities, which could include partner enablement and offering building

5. Innovation Consultant Job Description

Program Design: Work closely with prospective corporate partners, innovation ecosystem stakeholders and teams to design and execute start-up and corporate innovation programs and individual business transformations
Opportunity Support: Support corporate innovation teams in their quest for new business opportunities
Value Creation: Turn opportunities into significant business value and results by helping to advance through the innovation funnel, coaching, or finding suitable mentors for the corporate innovation teams
Team Facilitation: Facilitate product and innovation teams in a structured and agile way
Development Guidance: Guide them through the different phases of innovative product or service development
Partnership Growth: Grow meaningful long-term partnerships and anticipate their challenges in innovation, develop successful innovation strategies, as well as identify, conceptualize and create new product-market combinations
Account Strategy: Develop and analyze the current corporate innovation account management strategy and processes and spot bottlenecks and opportunities
Client Solutions: Understand the needs of clients and translate these into compelling solutions and sales proposals
Consultant Coaching: Coach and support the consultants in innovation consultancy and account management and help with hiring the best talent for teams

6. Network Innovation Consultant Details and Accountabilities

Pre-Sales Leadership: Lead pre-sales activities with new and existing distribution utility customers
Proposition Development: Lead the development of propositions, presentations and customer proposals
Offering Introduction: Lead the introduction of new propositions and offerings into the utilities
Customer Success: Work with existing customers to ensure customer success from existing projects
Needs Analysis: Work closely with distribution utilities to understand their needs
Sales Coordination: Coordinate sales activities in key accounts, including managing CRM and account plans
Content Creation: Prepare marketing content, magazine articles and conference papers
Group Participation: Participate in relevant working groups
Campaign Support: Work with marketing colleagues to provide support and content for marketing campaigns
Market Requirements: Liaise with product management to define and prioritize market requirements

7. Innovation Consultant Tasks

Self-Awareness: Use feedback and reflection to develop self-awareness, personal strengths and address development areas
Delegation Skills: Delegate to others to provide stretch opportunities, and coach them to deliver results
Insight Extraction: Use a broad range of tools and techniques to extract insights from current industry or sector trends
Quality Review: Review work and that of others for quality, accuracy and relevance
Tool Application: Know how and when to use the tools available for a given situation and explain the reasons for this choice
Opportunity Seeking: Seek and embrace opportunities which give exposure to different situations, environments and perspectives
Structured Communication: Use straightforward communication in a structured way when influencing and connecting with others
Relationship Building: Read situations and modify behavior to build quality relationships
Ethical Conduct: Uphold the firm's code of ethics and business conduct

8. Construction Technology & Innovation Consultant Additional Details

Process Documentation: Assist project teams in documenting business processes and identifying ways to improve the execution of projects and services to improve workflow and efficiencies
Solution Presentation: Present proposed project execution solutions (including software, hardware, code writing, automated processes, etc.)
Proof Execution: Be responsible for executing proof of concept activities, including detailed savings, benefits and automated process improvements
Technology Implementation: Implement technology solutions for stakeholder successful adoption
Technology Support: Provide technology support to teams and processes to ensure optimal utilization
Process Evaluation: Evaluate existing processes and technology tools and deploy new tools to improve efficiency and workflow improvements on client projects
Innovation Research: Research and implement new technology and develop innovative approaches to services and client deliverables
Trend Presentation: Attend tradeshows and conferences to present emerging trends, markets and technologies to leadership
Product Innovation: Develop technologically innovative products, solutions and services to create new revenue streams and improve project profit margins
Business Case: Assist in the development of business cases for large investments and initiatives to enter into a partnership
Venture Launch: Assist in the presentation and launch of a new venture through the launch program
Vendor Management: Develop and maintain external vendor relationships and evaluate integration of their solutions into business processes
Stakeholder Collaboration: Collaborate with internal stakeholders, such as IT and strategic initiatives, to build holistic and cohesive solutions for clients

9. Innovation Consultant Essential Functions

Data Analysis: Undertake quantitative and qualitative analysis
Insight Shaping: Shape insights about the future of technology sectors
Deliverable Leadership: Lead the creation of client deliverables with input from the team
Output Creation: Create high-impact outputs that help clients make decisions on their emerging technology strategy
Solution Validation: Define and manage routes to validate emerging technology solutions such as POCs, pilots and new venture design
Innovator Engagement: Engage with innovators to understand their needs, challenges and the interventions that will support their growth
Consortia Building: Pull together consortia of world-leading talent to better solve mission-critical challenges
Program Delivery: Work on the design and delivery of world-class innovation and challenge-led programmes
Workstream Management: Manage inputs across several workstreams
Stakeholder Communication: Proactively manage regular interaction, communication and collaboration with external stakeholders
Business Development: Lead specific areas of business development by responding to public sector bids and leading bespoke proposals

10. Innovation Consultant General Responsibilities

Collaboration Skills: Work collaboratively with industry and practice leadership to mine signals of change on business disruption from an outside-in perspective and apply design thinking to develop unique points of view and solve complex business challenges for the firm and clients
Session Facilitation: Design a session agenda for C-suite audiences and facilitate an engaging session experience
Material Development: Develop session materials and session debrief materials, take notes during sessions, capture and synthesize information from sessions into debrief materials
Research Synthesis: Conduct research, synthesize and correlate innovation research findings through a design thinking lens and conduct design thinking sessions to develop unique points of view and insights
Signal Mining: Mine signals of change from an outside-in perspective
Trend Analysis: Develop a deep understanding of people and social, technology, economic and investment trends
Stakeholder Management: Support the management of stakeholders on multiple projects across areas of focus
Project Management: Develop and manage project plans and financials

11. Innovation Consultant Key Accountabilities

Strategy Coaching: Help clients shape and execute their growth and innovation strategies by building and coaching their internal innovation teams
Opportunity Support: Support corporate innovation teams in their quest for new desirable, viable and feasible business opportunities
Team Staffing: Source or staff people for the team and hire business designers for new projects
Team Growth: Grow the team and follow up with weekly check-ins with everyone individually
Account Analysis: Analyze current account management strategy and processes and be able to spot bottlenecks and opportunities
Client Solutions: Understand the needs of clients and translate these into compelling solutions and sales proposals
Deal Negotiation: Negotiate complex deals with procurement and the C-suite for existing clients
Tender Participation: Participate in competitive tenders and create stand-out stories when the new biz team asks for help
Stakeholder Mapping: Map out stakeholders in a large corporate context and grow meaningful client partnerships accordingly
Consultant Coaching: Coach and support the consultants in innovation consultancy and account management and help with hiring the best profiles for teams
Talent Development: Make sure that the people in the team thrive and that they can grow towards their ambitious dream job

12. Innovation Consultant Roles and Details

Innovation Leadership: Lead, facilitate and support innovation activities within the company and client sites
Methodology Support: Apply standards and methodologies, provide expertise and support on the use of innovation methods and tools
Tool Consultation: Provide consultation on innovation tools and methods
Workshop Facilitation: Convene workshops with clearly defined innovation themes and engaged stakeholders
Idea Management: Support the company's idea management system, including the capturing, evaluation, selection and implementation of employees’ ideas
Technology Awareness: Maintain awareness of opportunities and make use of new and emerging technologies to address challenges or enable new ways of working to add potential value to the client
Pipeline Management: Maintain the innovation pipeline of ideas and prototypes and the continuous upkeep of the inventory tools and methods
Progress Monitoring: Ensure the progress of ideas and prototypes through the pipeline at an agreed run rate
Risk Assessment: Identify and assess risks to the success of the project and prototypes
Project Planning: Agree on the prototype or project approach with stakeholders and prepare plans, managing stakeholder involvement
Status Guidance: Maintain the status updates and provide guidance, working across teams to achieve group goals
Team Collaboration: Actively participate and deliver on own objectives within innovation activities, assist other team members and provide input into team project planning
Ecosystem Networking: Participate in external networking and partnership activities to grow the company’s ecosystem and support an open innovation approach

13. Senior Innovation Consultant Responsibilities and Key Tasks

Team Leadership: Lead project teams, typically alongside an engagement manager but sometimes on own
Product Development: Manage the design and development of new products, services and business model solutions
Client Management: Regularly interface with senior clients as one of, or the primary, relationship managers
Consumer Insights: Generate and articulate truly transformational consumer insights
Project Management: Work across and manage multiple live projects at any given point in time
Framework Definition: Contribute to the team’s identification of an overall strategic framework at project inception and steer it with guidance and support from the project director
Idea Portfolio: Co-lead or lead the definition, articulation and defense of a portfolio of ideas that meet the challenges of the project brief
Strategic Expression: Influence the strategic expression of the chosen ideas in consumer-ready form (e.g., via concept and or script for a video prototype) in tandem with design team
Research Oversight: Design and oversee qualitative research activities from more traditional methodologies like focus groups to more contemporary ones like mobile video diaries and online communities
Idea Articulation: Articulate the definition of each idea and the rationale behind it at client presentations
Creative Thinking: Generate innovative ideas, think creatively and inspire ideas in others with the ability to describe and define those ideas to the team
Idea Analysis: Provide interrogation and analysis of the innovation ideas, build back up and stimulus for each, and obtain a sense of feasibility and do-ability around them
Narrative Development: Work alongside the engagement manager to lead the verbal and visual articulation of the strategic narrative, summarising work and its value to senior client stakeholders
Proposal Formulation: Work with clients and engagement managers to formulate project proposals, including the scope of work and the innovation challenge
Mentorship Skills: Lead, inspire and mentor the innovation associates and innovation consultants in the idea development team in and outside of projects

14. Innovation Consultant Duties and Roles

Scoping Sessions: Lead on scoping and discovery sessions with clients to help produce project proposals that provide clear and achievable deliverables
Proposal Management: Work with colleagues in legal and finance to ensure proposals are appropriately costed and contracted
Client Relations: Build and maintain strong relationships with clients
Project Leadership: Act as the project lead, translating the brief, assigning team roles, planning the approach and building the design toolkit for each phase to successfully deliver on the project
Team Management: Line manage and support innovation consultants as part of delivery team
Research Analysis: Carry out and supervise desk-based research and analysis, drawing on a wide range of resources
Portfolio Management: Manage a portfolio of projects, providing effective project and budget management against key metrics and milestones
Client Communication: Communicate regularly with clients on progress, acting as the main point of contact
Insight Gathering: Facilitate and moderate interviews, workshops and panels to gather citizen insights that communicate the wants, needs and desires of potential users
Report Writing: Produce detailed outputs, reports and case studies that collate information from a variety of sources and present key findings
Project Review: Lead on project reviews, analysing lessons learned and ensuring they are applied to future projects
Content Support: Provide content for marketing and communications staff in the preparation of media and press releases
Process Development: Contribute to and help further develop processes and methodologies

15. Innovation Consultant Roles and Responsibilities

Business Engagement: Engage with business leaders and with key areas of the business to forge relationships and understand the challenges and strategic goals
Opportunity Identification: Identify opportunities for innovation by understanding problems, needs and ideas from the business, the customers (employers, providers, brokers) and the members (consumers)
Pipeline Management: Build a pipeline of ideas, manage the pipeline and prioritize the pipeline through criteria that ensure alignment with the strategic goals and desired focus areas
Vendor Exploration: Explore vendors and technologies in the market that could provide a solution or component of a solution and make build, buy, partner recommendations
Funding Approval: Secure approval and funding to advance through the innovation process
Initiative Management: Shepherd innovation initiatives through the innovation process as part of the multi-disciplinary team
Pilot Planning: Seek funding and recommend the development or pilot and launch and scale plan for each initiative
Progress Tracking: Track and report on ideas in the pipeline, on active initiatives in the innovation funnel or pipeline and on pilots that are in development and getting launched

16. Innovation Consultant Duties

Infrastructure Development: Assist in the development of innovation infrastructure, process and capabilities
Agenda Coordination: Develop, coordinate and consolidate agenda items and presentation materials for meetings involving internal and external parties
Market Research: Contribute to landscape analyses, market research and capability gap assessments to inform the center for health care innovation strategies, disruptive trends and develop sourcing strategies for ventures
Network Cultivation: Cultivate and grow an internal network of applicable subject matter experts and advisors while maintaining an external network of entrepreneurs and investors who are interested in working closely with the organization
Event Facilitation: Plan and facilitate internal educational seminars, proposal calls, pitch events and other innovation events
Award Coordination: Coordinate, oversee and provide traction of internal innovation awards
Milestone Tracking: Track milestones in an effort to evaluate traction and commercial viability
Activity Planning: Support coordination and planning efforts of the center for health care innovation activities, engagements and projects
Portfolio Management: Participate in innovation diligence process and innovation portfolio management, including innovation idea prioritization and evaluation, clinical need impact assessment, financial assessment and forecasting, value-adding projection, negotiation, contracting and piloting
Deal Support: Coordinate internal processes and external meetings to support partnerships or investment deal execution
Pilot Design: Design and implement pilots in partnership with key stakeholders, including clinical champions, ITS, patient experience and operational staff
Metrics Development: Develop metrics and endpoints so that the Center for Health Care Innovation pilots and projects can be managed with a data-driven strategy
Performance Tracking: Track key performance metrics to measure impact and value creation
Financial Analysis: Contribute to financial analysis of internal and external projects, including analysis and projections of returns, scenario planning and operating plan analysis

17. Senior Aviation Innovation Consultant Job Summary

Relationship Management: Build and manage relationships with the industry as their primary point of contact with the CAA
Support Identification: Identify what support the industry requires from the CAA and create technical proposals that document the support offering
Team Management: Manage project teams of individuals across different CAA regulatory functions
Regulation Clarification: Work closely with industry, clarify the regulations that apply to their innovation
Approval Guidance: Advise on processes to seek regulatory approval and plan roadmaps in conjunction with the industry to achieve the objectives of their project
Expert Connection: Connect the industry to the right subject matter experts within the CAA
Workshop Facilitation: Mediate discussions and facilitate workshops between the industry and the CAA regulatory teams
Expert Advice: Provide expert advice and guidance on regulatory expectations to maintain safety, security and consumer protection
Sandbox Testing: Facilitate testing in a sandbox environment to build the evidence supporting regulatory approvals for trials
Project Analysis: Analyse and interpret findings from projects with industry
Guidance Development: Contribute to crafting regulatory guidance and regulatory principles

18. Innovation Consultant Job Description

Vision Development: Support the development of corporate vision, strategies and innovation for Zurich North America and designated business units
Market Intelligence: Develop market intelligence and conduct competitive landscape analyses, serving as an expert on market innovation and customer trends
Opportunity Evaluation: Evaluate business opportunities and prepare business cases from strategic, operational and financial perspectives, which will include building a robust pipeline of tangible innovation ideas to explore
Problem Solving: Facilitate and support complex problem-solving of the most important challenges facing Zurich North America, from idea inception to testing proof of concept
Change Management: Support appropriate change management practices that are effectively utilized throughout the lifecycle to improve execution and delivery of results
Communication Development: Develop written communications (e.g., PowerPoint and SOAPs) that convey analyses and insights in a cohesive story, adapting to meet stakeholder needs and expectations
Green Innovation: Assess opportunities to accelerate the green innovations of clients, specifically in the energy, environment or mobility domains
Project Drafting: Draft high-quality project plans, reports, funding applications or business cases in direct coordination with clients
Innovation Assessment: Perform innovation assessment studies (CBA, stakeholder analyses, access-to-finance studies, partner searches)
Business Development: Support the growth by means of business development or by strengthening or developing new services

19. Innovation Consultant Tasks

Research Analysis: Undertake desk-based research and analysis of results for client projects
Leader Communication: Communicate with commercial, technical and operational opinion leaders
Strategy Development: Develop recommendations, strategies and write project reports
Workshop Facilitation: Chair meetings and facilitate workshops and present findings to internal teams and clients
Project Definition: Take a lead role in defining projects and generating proposals
Methodology Exploration: Seek out emerging techniques and methodologies that enable delivering solutions in projects with complex pricing challenges
Technical Coaching: Act as a coach and resource on technical and modeling topics, actively promote team involvement and increase team efficiency
Project Leadership: Lead multiple projects by defining project plans, ensuring the team executes on deliverables and providing actuarial feedback on projects led by other departments
Skill Development: Actively learn innovative techniques, programming languages and software
Study Support: Support research studies from proposal through to analysis and reporting
Client Management: Manage relationships with key clients on a day-to-day basis and lead study debriefs
Team Leadership: Work with or lead associates and senior associates to ensure quality and timely delivery, and help train new members to the team
Process Improvement: Help other team members to ensure projects are set up accurately, ensure best practices are adhered to and teach methods to improve effectiveness and efficiency
Domain Strategy: Contribute to the domain strategy by leading a project crafted to increase efficiencies, automation and quality of output

20. Innovation Consultant Role Purpose

Team Collaboration: Collaborate with multi-disciplinary colleagues who have varying levels of creative and analytical expertise
Design Facilitation: Lead multi-disciplinary internal and customer teams through design thinking exercises
Critique Leadership: Lead multi-disciplinary internal and customer teams through critique sessions to review and improve the work
Session Facilitation: Design and facilitate complex work sessions for C-suite executives and cross-functional teams
Global Collaboration: Collaborate in English face-to-face and virtually with global colleagues and customers from many different cultures and who speak many different first languages
Problem Structuring: Understand client business and technology issues and structure the problem to develop hypotheses around possible solutions
Issue Analysis: Understand the company’s key strategic, operational and technology issues (market definition, industry trends, client issues, technology maturity, automation, cloud, platform potential)
Data Analysis: Compile data and conduct analyses of data to prove or disprove the hypotheses
Solution Structuring: Structure integrated business and technology solutions to positively impact in client's business and operations
Practice Development: Collaborate with colleagues to work on internal operations and the development of best practices around innovation
Business Acumen: Demonstrate business acumen to assist in building value propositions, business cases and supporting financial models
Offering Development: Develop, propose and deliver innovative offerings and engagement across products and services as they plan, develop, build and deploy their innovation programs

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