Chief Strategy & Innovation Officer


 

CURRENT JOB POSTING – CHIEF STRATEGY & INNOVATION OFFICER

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Who We Are

E&I Cooperative Services is a member-owned engine for value creation in education. While our competitively awarded contracts remain a powerful core, we’re moving rapidly beyond contracts to design, incubate, and scale a broader portfolio of products and services—digital tools, integrated supplier solutions, data & insights, training, networking, and advisory programs—that solve high-priority institutional challenges. We co-create with our 6,000+ member institutions and supplier partners, measure success by adoption and outcomes, and reinvest learnings to accelerate what works. 

This evolution demands a leader who thinks like a Chief Product + Strategy Officer: someone who can run a venture-style portfolio, stand up repeatable discovery-to-scale practices, and leverage AI/agentic workflows to expand capacity and speed from idea to impact. The goal is simple: deliver solutions that drive member results and sustainable economics for the Cooperative—consistently and at scale. 

If you’re a forward-looking leader at the intersection of strategy, product & service design, and go-to-market execution, join us to help redefine what a cooperative can deliver beyond contracts.  

 

What Makes E&I Unique

•  Mission-Driven Impact: At E&I, your work directly supports the success of educational institutions nationwide, from universities to K-12 schools.

•   Growth Culture: We are passionate about the power of culture to create conditions for excellence. We believe in the power of linking arms and lifting each other up in pursuit of common objectives. And we invest heavily in the personal and professional development of every single member of our team.

•    The Best of All Worlds: We’re ninety years old - but act like a startup. We’re a non-profit cooperative - with a high-growth enterprise mindset. We work hard – and play hard. We love success - but reward failure that comes from bold ideas and big swings. We combine tradition with innovation, passion with purpose, and ambition with heart.

 

What You Will Do

Reporting to the CEO and serving on the Executive Team, the Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer (CSIO) role will help drive our next chapter of growth and own four pillars:

  1. Corporate Strategy
  2. Product & Service Strategy
  3. New Products & Services R&D (non-contract offerings)
  4. Internal AI Innovation (scaling enterprise use of AI to drive efficiency and unlock innovation capacity)


This leader will build an innovation engine that consistently ships value—singles, doubles, and home runs—while embracing well-conceived strikeouts—through a portfolio approach and metered investment.

Initial team: VP, Strategy (to lead on Corporate and Portfolio Strategy) and VP, AI Innovation (to lead on Internal AI Innovation) will report to the CSIO. The CSIO will expand and shape the organization as the portfolio grows.

 

How You Will Do It


What You’ll Lead

  • Corporate Strategy: Annual/long-range strategy, competitive positioning, portfolio choices.
  • Product & Service Strategy (non-contract): Market discovery, product theses, and commercialization paths for services and solutions outside of competitively sourced contracts.
  • R&D / Incubation: Stage-gated incubation from concept → pilot → scale readiness; clear kill/scale discipline.
  • Internal AI Innovation: Establish a modern “Intelligence Resources” capability (think HR+IT for digital labor) and lead the move from “assistant use” → “human-agent teams” → “human-led, agent-operated” workflows.


Key Responsibilities

1) Corporate & Portfolio Strategy

  • Lead the Development of Enterprise Strategy & Targets
    Own and lead a process with the Executive Team that helps us define where to play/how to win, the 3–5 year value creation plan, and annual priorities including success metrics.
  • Translate Strategy into Portfolio & Resource Allocation
    With the Executive Team as partner, help prioritize initiatives across the company, sequence them, and recommend aligned budgets, headcount, and capital (start/stop/scale decisions; metered funding; dependency management).
  • Own the Strategy Operating System
    Own the cadence and instrumentation—quarterly reviews, dashboards, external/competitive sensing, scenario planning—and drive course corrections and alignment with the CEO, Executive Team, and on occasion, Board.

2) Product & Service Strategy (Non-Contract Offerings)

  • Own the portfolio & roadmap: Define the product thesis backlog for non-contract offerings (member problems, target segments, value prop, pricing/business model, success metrics) and maintain a prioritized roadmap aligned to corporate strategy.
  • Run an evidence-based discovery → scale system: Stand up stage gates with metered funding, rapid market discovery and prototyping, member pilots, and disciplined kill/scale decisions grounded in ROI and adoption data.
  • Partner to drive commercialization & lifecycle performance: In close collaboration with the Go-to-Market team, help orchestrate GTM (packaging/pricing, channels, enablement), launch, and adoption with members/suppliers, and manage in-life performance (revenue, margin, utilization, retention, NPS) with continuous improvement until the product or service is ready for handoff elsewhere in the organization for scaling.

3) New Product/Service R&D & Incubation

  • Build a repeatable incubation program (0→1→n), including venture-style investment memos and milestone-based funding.
  • Recruit/assemble cross-functional tiger teams and external partners when speed or expertise demands it.
  • Codify a kill fast / scale fast discipline—celebrate wins, learn from losses, protect capacity.

4) Internal AI Innovation (Efficiency & Capacity)

  • Architect the enterprise AI strategy & operating model that turns AI into durable capacity—aligning platforms, digital labor, data, talent, and change management to clear business outcomes.
  • Redesign priority value streams for a human-led, AI-operated future, defining roles, human-in-the-loop points, and target metrics for quality, speed, cost, and risk.
  • Expand an AI upskilling program so every employee becomes an “agent boss” (delegation, prompting, oversight, quality).
  • Ensure strong governance and guardrails (security, privacy, model/agent approval, auditing, bias monitoring, data retention).
  • Track and reinvest hours saved / cost avoided / cycle time reduced and help redeploy human capacity to higher-value work.

5) Culture, Ways of Working, and Change Leadership

  • Embed member-centric design and rapid experimentation; champion our values: Relentless Learning, Member-Obsessed, Candor with Care, Better Together, Proud Owners.
  • Communicate simply and often: narrative memos, demos, internal roadshows, and show-the-work artifacts.

6) Partnerships & Ecosystem

  • Build a partner ecosystem (universities, suppliers, startups, research labs, systems integrators) to accelerate discovery, prototyping, and scale.
  • Where helpful, leverage co-development / co-selling with suppliers and strategic alliances.


Qualifications

  • 15+ years progressively responsible experience spanning corporate strategy, product/innovation leadership, and operating transformation, ideally in B2B services, platforms, or education/public-sector adjacent markets.
  • Proven record building 0→1→n products/services with evidence-based, stage-gated portfolios and clear P&L ownership.
  • AI/automation fluency: practical experience redesigning workflows with AI/ML, or agentic systems; understands data, safety, governance, and change management.
  • Exceptional portfolio thinking: capacity allocation, metered funding, risk management, and kill/scale discipline.
  • Outstanding communication and influence skills; able to align executives, boards, and cross-functional teams; crisp narrative writing.
  • Comfort operating in high-ambiguity, high-accountability environments with a bias to ship.
  • Experience in the education ecosystem (higher ed or K-12) or mission-driven cooperatives is a plus.

Travel Requirements

  •  Travel to internal meetings, member engagements, supplier visits and demos approximately 20%

 

 

Call To Action


If you’re ready to build and scale a product and service portfolio —combining strategy, product innovation, and AI-driven operating change—we want to meet you. Apply now and help shape E&I’s next chapter and the future of solutions for education. 
 

Use the "Apply Now" button on our careers page and submit your resume and a cover letter specifying your salary expectations.  All submissions will be handled with the highest level of confidentiality. 

 

E&I is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to providing equal opportunities for employment and advancement without regard to an individual’s race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, sexual orientation, marital status, or any characteristic protected by local, state, or federal law.   





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