Innovation Technology – New Ventures/Finance Strategist

Location: Mountain View, CA

General Description: Innovation Technology – New Ventures/Finance Strategist

Samsung Research America is a leader in the discovery, research and development of Consumer Electronics. Driven by meaningful innovation, Samsung creates breakthrough technology products that are personalized, relevant and genuinely enhance daily life. This has empowered Samsung to become the market share leader in smartphones globally, as well as in televisions, memory, display drivers, and refrigerators. Samsung weaves cutting-edge technology into the roadmap of all of our existing product lines, and is constantly creating new adjacencies in breakthrough areas like VR/AR, Connected Car, Mobility, 5G, Blockchain, and so on.

Within Samsung Research America and Think Tank Team, the Innovation Management Group identifies new growth areas and develops strategies to roadmap the best approach for new businesses, leveraging knowledge of disruptive technologies developed internally and externally.

Come join Samsung and be a part of the future of human-to-device interaction, with the potential to impact hundreds of millions of people.

Position Summary:

The Innovation Technology – New Ventures/Finance Strategist will report to the Innovation Management Group Lead for Samsung Research America. The IMG team works closely with Global teams across product planning, R&D, strategy, venture, marketing, and design to improve innovation processes, evaluate/integrate/propagate new technologies across the family of mobile products, create innovation guidelines and best practices, and develop strategies and roadmaps for new tech verticals to be created.

Responsibilities Include:

• As a key responsibility within the team, be able to evaluate companies from a financial/investment perspective with particular focus on technology valuation, management assessment, proven track record, market size, and risk
• Know the technology M&A/startup landscape, and understand the fundraising and due-diligence process associated with investment, venture, seed-to-series funding, as an entrepreneur and/or as an investor
• Scout emerging technology and evaluate relevance for Samsung, building core knowledge to become subject matter experts as possible so that strategies can be created
• Learn and evaluate existing innovation activities across Samsung and develop relationships with various areas of HQ product development, from design, planning, marketing, to R&D
• Build a framework to improve innovation sharing and instill best-practices for new technology integration across product lines to create a consistent ecosystem of products
• Perform rapid market research of new technology trends and consumer-technology interaction, and synthesize into deep insight for management, with focus on the financial attractiveness of the technology
• Be able to grasp technical processes and systems architecture, HW and SW jargon, have working knowledge of mobile and personal productivity technology
• Analyze 3rd party company technology, assess core capabilities and unique IP, and perform valuation on IP
• Storytelling—define and articulate in elaborate presentations the use cases/features/requirements/demographics for new technology. PowerPoint expertise is a strong requirement.
• Contribute to the vision and roadmap of our overall products and services
• Collaborate with team members to create executive recommendations on innovation management strategy

Experience Requirements:

• Bachelor’s degree required, and MBA or Masters in equivalent business / finance area preferred. Degree in Engineering, CS, or similar technical background is a plus.
• 3+ years of in technology-related investment/financial analysis from a VC or entrepreneur/angel investing perspective required and any of the following:
  • 2+ years of any of the following: product management, business strategy, technical project management, innovation management, strategy consulting, working with analytics and translating metrics, research, and trends into strategy
  • 2+ years of experience in technology scouting, communication with partners (Silicon Valley startups, accelerator programs, VCs, etc)
  • 2+ years of venture and corporate capital investment analysis and executive management reporting
• Background in any of the following is a plus: Autonomous driving, mobile technology and services, AR/VR, display technologies, AI, robotics, blockchain, gaming/esports
• Excellent communication and presentation skills, with expert-level of PowerPoint and Excel capability
• Self-starter and fast learner, as well as Team player