UK

United Kingdom · Innovation Intrapreneurship · Principal/Manager (12-16 years)

Manager, New Ventures

Here is the whole job, in plain words. What it is, a real day, what you decide, how you're judged, how people get here and where they go next. Then the part no course gives you: twelve AI tutors who learn your work.

  • Experience bandPrincipal/Manager (12-16 years)
  • Direct reports3-8 reports
  • Reports toDirector, Business Concepts & Innovation
  • UK framework levelUsually a manager, or the deepest specialist in a team

Also advertised as Principal Business Concepts Director · Head of Innovation Concepts · Lead Intrapreneur (Team Manager) · Innovation Portfolio Lead

Built on an analysis of 43,079 real UK job descriptions · grounded in qualifications employers recognise

Start with a free Future Fluency check, tuned to Manager, New Ventures

Ten quick questions, one per Future Fluency, asked against this role rather than a generic one. About five minutes, and no card.

Start the check, free

1What this role really is

This role is all about building the future. You'll lead a small, sharp team of intrapreneurs, guiding them through the messy early stages of new business concepts. Think of yourself as a venture capitalist and a coach, all rolled into one, but within a big company. You're not just coming up with ideas; you're making sure they actually get built, tested, and, if they prove themselves, eventually 'graduate' into a proper business unit. It's a tough gig, but incredibly rewarding when you see your team's work take off.

2What you'd actually use

The tools this job runs on, and how well you'd need to know each one.

Miro / MuralStrategic/Architect

You'll integrate Miro/Mural outputs into strategic planning tools, ensuring visual collaboration feeds into broader company objectives. You'll also train the organisation on best practices for visual collaboration, acting as an internal champion.

Figma / BalsamiqStrategic/Architect

You'll evaluate and select the best prototyping platforms for your team's needs, articulating how specific design choices connect to underlying business model assumptions. You'll ensure design thinking is deeply embedded in the venture creation process.

PitchBook / CB Insights / StatistaStrategic/Architect

You'll direct the research strategy for your team, identifying which data sources are needed to validate the corporate thesis and uncover 'white space' opportunities. You'll negotiate enterprise licenses and ensure the team is getting the most out of these tools.

Aha! / ProductboardStrategic/Architect

You'll manage the entire innovation portfolio within these tools, creating executive dashboards that show progress against strategic goals, experiment velocity, and portfolio health. You'll use these to communicate with the Venture Board.

Excel (Power Query, Scenario Manager) / CausalStrategic/Architect

You'll audit and stress-test the complex financial models built by your team. You'll also use tools like Anaplan or Pigment (if available) to connect venture portfolio forecasts to corporate FP&A, ensuring financial rigour.

Tableau / Power BI Premium / Diligent BoardsStrategic/Architect

You'll build and present innovation portfolio performance dashboards to the executive committee and the Venture Board, using these tools to tell a clear, data-driven story about your team's progress and impact.

3What you get to decide, and how that grows

Power in a job isn't your title. It's what you're allowed to decide. Here's how it grows as you move up.

The choiceComing inWhere you are nowThe step above
Strategic Direction of New ConceptsN/A (Executes assigned tasks)N/A (Proposes solutions for specific problems)Recommends strategic themes and validation approaches within a specific workstream to the Manager.
Team Hiring & PerformanceN/A (No reports)N/A (No reports, informal guidance only)Provides input on hiring for L1/L2 roles; mentors junior team members.
Budget Allocation & Vendor SelectionN/A (No budget authority)N/A (No budget authority)Recommends tools or small vendor engagements (up to £5K) to Manager.

4How you'll be judged

The scoreboard, honestly: the hard targets, how often each one is actually looked at, and the quiet human signals that never make it onto a dashboard.

Innovation Portfolio Funding Secured
The total amount of internal funding your team's concepts secure from the Venture Board.
Target · Secure £500K - £2M in annual funding for the innovation portfolio.

In Q2, your team secured £750K for three concepts, pushing the annual total to £1.2M, hitting the mid-range of the target.

Venture Graduation Rate
The number of validated business concepts that successfully transition ('graduate') from the innovation lab into a core Business Unit for scaling.
Target · Achieve a graduation rate of 2 ventures into core business units per year.

By year-end, two of your team's concepts, 'Subscription Box for X' and 'AI-powered Y Service', were successfully handed over to the Retail and Tech BUs respectively.

Portfolio Alignment with Strategic Pillars
How well your team's active innovation concepts align with the company's stated 5-year strategic objectives.
Target · Ensure the innovation portfolio is 80%+ aligned with the company's 5-year strategic pillars.

Your Q3 review showed 85% of active projects directly supported 'Digital Transformation' and 'New Market Expansion' pillars, a clear win.

Team Concept-to-Business-Case Conversion Rate
The percentage of initial ideas your team explores that successfully progress to a fully validated business case, ready for Venture Board pitch.
Target · Maintain a 25% concept-to-funded-business-case conversion rate across your team's pipeline.

Out of 12 initial concepts explored in H1, 3 reached the business case stage and secured initial funding, hitting the 25% target.

Venture Board Trust & Influence
Your ability to build credibility with the Venture Board, leading to proactive consultation and a high approval rate for your team's pitches.
  • You're regularly invited to informal discussions about strategic innovation themes. The Venture Board often seeks your opinion on new market trends or potential pivots. Your team's proposals have a consistently high approval rate, indicating confidence in your oversight and validation process.
Team Development & Retention
The growth and engagement of your direct reports, evidenced by skill development, successful promotions, and low attrition.
  • You've successfully mentored at least one L2 team member to promotion within 18 months. Your team members consistently report high satisfaction in their 1:1s and engagement surveys, citing your coaching and support. You're seen as a leader who genuinely invests in their people's careers.
Cross-functional Collaboration & Partnership
How effectively you and your team build relationships and secure resources from other departments, seen as a valuable partner rather than a disruptor.
  • Business Unit Heads proactively reach out to you to discuss potential 'graduation' paths for new ventures. Finance and Legal teams are willing to work with your team to find pragmatic solutions for early-stage concepts. You're regularly invited to contribute to broader strategic planning sessions, showing your influence beyond innovation.

5Would you like it

The honest version. What people enjoy, and what grinds them down.

What people enjoy
Building New Businesses from Scratch

You get a real buzz from seeing a nascent idea transform into a validated concept with real customer traction. You're constantly thinking about market opportunities and how to capture them.

Spending your morning coaching a team member on refining their business model canvas, then celebrating with them when their concept gets initial Venture Board funding.

Leading and Developing a High-Performing Team

You genuinely enjoy coaching, mentoring, and seeing your direct reports grow. Their success is your success, and you're always looking for ways to empower them.

Spending dedicated time in 1:1s, not just on project updates, but on career development, skill gaps, and helping a team member navigate a tough stakeholder conversation.

Shaping the Company's Future Strategy

You want to be at the table where big decisions are made about where the company is heading. You're driven by the opportunity to influence long-term strategic direction through new ventures.

Presenting your team's portfolio review to the Director, not just as a status update, but as a strategic input for future investment areas.

What frustrates people
  • Fighting the Corporate Immune System: Constantly justifying your team's methods and existence to departments (like Finance and Legal) built for certainty, not exploration and failure.
  • The Tyranny of the Quarterly Business Review (QBR): Being pushed to show short-term, hard-ROI metrics for ventures that might not generate revenue for 3-5 years, or ever.
  • Stakeholder Whiplash: An executive sponsor loves your team's idea on Monday, but after a tough QBR on Wednesday, they get cold feet and ask you to pivot to something 'safer' – or worse, pull resources.
  • Pilot Purgatory: Your team successfully proves a concept in a pilot, but it never gets the resources to scale because it's not a core business priority. It becomes a 'zombie project' that consumes resources indefinitely.
  • Resource Scavenging: Having to constantly beg, borrow, and 'influence' time from developers and marketers in the core business who are already over-committed to existing products.
  • 'Death by a Thousand Papercuts': The sheer exhaustion from navigating procurement, legal reviews, and IT security hurdles that are designed for billion-pound business lines, not a two-person experiment. You'll spend time unblocking your team from these.
What this role does not give you
  • A predictable, linear career path with clearly defined project outcomes.
  • Direct control over large budgets or dedicated engineering teams for every new concept.
  • A quiet, solitary work environment where you can focus solely on analysis without constant stakeholder interaction.
  • The guarantee that every successful pilot will automatically be scaled into a full business.

6Who you work with

You'll directly shape our future growth. Your team's ability to identify, validate, and launch new business concepts is crucial for diversifying our revenue streams and keeping us competitive. You're essentially building the next generation of our business, which, frankly, is a pretty big deal. Getting it right means new markets and happier customers; getting it wrong means we miss out on opportunities and potentially fall behind.

Inside the business
  • Director, Business Concepts & Innovation (your direct boss)
  • The Venture Board (senior leadership who approve funding)
  • Heads of Business Units (where successful ventures 'graduate')
  • Finance & Legal (critical partners for compliance and budget)
  • Product & Engineering Leads (for technical feasibility and resources)
  • Marketing & Sales Leadership (for go-to-market strategy)
Outside the business
  • External innovation partners (e.g., accelerators, consultancies)
  • Industry experts and thought leaders
  • Potential technology vendors for new solutions

7What you need before you start

Not a wish list. The things you would be expected to already have.

  • Proven track record of leading complex innovation projects or new product development initiatives from concept to market, with demonstrable commercial outcomes (even if small).
  • Experience managing and mentoring junior to mid-level team members, with a focus on their professional development and project delivery.
  • Demonstrated ability to secure internal funding or resources for unproven concepts, navigating organisational hurdles and presenting compelling business cases.
  • Deep practical experience with Lean Startup, Human-Centered Design, and Business Model Canvas methodologies, not just theoretical knowledge.
  • Strong financial acumen, including experience building and stress-testing venture financial models (unit economics, market sizing).
  • Excellent communication and influencing skills, with a history of engaging and persuading senior stakeholders across different functions.

8What to practise next

Where the job is going, and what to do about it starting this week.

Advanced Data Visualisation & Storytelling

As data volumes grow, the ability to distil complex insights into clear, compelling visual narratives for the Venture Board and senior leadership becomes even more critical. You'll need to guide your team in creating impactful dashboards and presentations that cut through the noise.

Executive Dashboard Design Principles · Narrative Visualisation Techniques · Interactive Reporting & Exploration

  • This quarter: Review best practices in executive reporting and data storytelling. Look at examples from top-tier consulting firms.
  • Next 6 months: Coach your team on improving their data visualisation skills, focusing on clarity and impact for senior audiences.
  • Month 7-9: Experiment with new features in Tableau/Power BI to create more dynamic and interactive portfolio reports.
  • Month 10-12: Seek feedback from Venture Board members on the effectiveness of your current reporting formats and iterate.

Quick win: Challenge your team to simplify their next project update to a single, impactful visual with a clear narrative. Less is often more when communicating complex innovation progress.

9Staying current once you are in

What people here do to keep up
  • Regularly attending industry conferences and workshops focused on corporate innovation, venture building, and emerging technologies.
  • Subscribing to and actively engaging with leading innovation publications, research papers, and thought leadership (e.g., Harvard Business Review, MIT Technology Review, VC blogs).
  • Participating in peer-to-peer innovation networks or communities to share best practices and learn from other leaders.
  • Mentoring junior talent within the organisation or externally, as teaching is often the best way to solidify your own understanding.

10How the AI economy is changing work like this

Before we ask anything of you, here's what we can already say about AI and work of this kind:

The new skill this role is being asked for: AI-Powered Portfolio Management & Prediction

AI is getting smarter at spotting patterns in data. Soon, we'll use AI to help predict which early-stage ventures have the highest chance of success, optimise resource allocation across the portfolio, and even identify potential 'zombie projects' earlier. Managers who can use these tools will make much sharper decisions.

We'll only ever tell you what we can actually back up. No hype, no scare tactics.

Your PlanIllustration

Built for Manager, New Ventures

3 units that map to this job, from the qualifications that cover it.

  1. Identify Enterprise Venture OpportunitiesSFEDI Enterprises Ltd. T/A SFEDI Awards · covers 1 of 5 standardsLevel 6
  2. Develop working relationships with stakeholdersVTCT Skills · covers 1 of 5 standardsLevel 5
  3. Strategic Enterprise ManagementABE · covers 2 of 5 standardsLevel 7
These are the real units behind this job, in the order they rank for it. Nothing here is marked done, because this plan has not been started by anyone yet. Yours would fill in as you go.

The rising capability

Zavmo analysis

What's rising in its place

This is where the work is heading, and the higher pay with it. Get fluent here and the shift stops being a threat and starts being your edge.

AI-Powered Portfolio Management & Prediction

AI is getting smarter at spotting patterns in data. Soon, we'll use AI to help predict which early-stage ventures have the highest chance of success, optimise resource allocation across the portfolio, and even identify potential 'zombie projects' earlier. Managers who can use these tools will make much sharper decisions.

  • Predictive Analytics for Venture Success
  • Optimisation Algorithms for Resource Allocation
  • Early Warning Systems for Project Risk
  • Generative AI for Scenario Planning

Ecosystem Orchestration & External Partnership Management

No company can innovate alone anymore. The future of corporate innovation is about building and managing a network of external partners – startups, universities, accelerators, even corporate venture capital funds. As a manager, you'll need to go beyond managing your internal team and actively orchestrate this broader ecosystem to bring new capabilities and ideas into the company.

  • Corporate Venture Capital (CVC) Engagement
  • Startup Accelerator/Incubator Collaboration
  • Open Innovation Platforms
  • University & Research Institution Partnerships

What you’ll use

Skills this role draws on

Technical

  • Lean Startup Methodology (Strategic Application)
  • Human-Centered Design (Guiding & Auditing)
  • Business Model Canvas / Lean Canvas (Portfolio Level)
  • Venture Financial Modelling (Auditing & Stress-Testing)
  • Corporate Venture Governance & Funding

The pathway

How you actually get there, here

How you become one varies far more by country than what one does. This is the UK route. Most people take one of these ways in; the right one depends on where you're starting from.

  1. 1

    Senior Business Concept Developer (L3) or Lead Intrapreneur (L4) within Zavmo

    3-5 years as an L3/L4

    Skills to master

    • Mastering end-to-end venture validation, successfully leading multiple concepts to the Venture Board, and demonstrating strong informal leadership and mentorship of junior colleagues. You'll need to show you can manage complex projects and influence stakeholders without direct authority.

    You're ready to move on when

    • Consistently high approval rates for your concepts from the Venture Board.
    • Positive feedback from junior colleagues you've mentored.
    • Proactively identifying and solving systemic issues in the innovation process.
    • Taking initiative on strategic themes beyond your immediate project scope.
  2. 2

    Product Manager (New Ventures focus) from another company

    7-10 years in Product Management, with a focus on new product launches or 0-to-1 initiatives.

    Skills to master

    • Translating product vision into a validated business concept, strong customer discovery and market sizing, and experience working with cross-functional teams to launch new offerings. You'll need to adapt your product management skills to the 'fuzzy front end' of innovation.

    You're ready to move on when

    • Successful track record of launching new products or features that generated significant revenue or user growth.
    • Experience leading product strategy for nascent offerings, not just optimising existing ones.
    • Demonstrable ability to work with ambiguous requirements and pivot quickly based on market feedback.
  3. 3

    Management Consultant (Innovation/Strategy focus)

    5-8 years at a top-tier consulting firm, specialising in innovation, growth strategy, or new business building.

    Skills to master

    • Translating strategic insights into actionable plans, structuring complex problems, and influencing senior clients. You'll need to demonstrate a shift from advisory to direct leadership and execution within a corporate environment.

    You're ready to move on when

    • Leading significant innovation or growth strategy engagements for large clients.
    • Strong client relationship management and persuasion skills.
    • Experience building and leading project teams, even if in a consulting context.

11Where this role leads

The long view:Your journey as a Manager, New Ventures, is a launchpad. Whether you want to climb the leadership ladder within innovation, transition to a core business leadership role, or even take your skills to the external startup world, this role will equip you with the strategic vision, leadership acumen, and practical experience to make a significant impact. It's a challenging path, but for the right person, it's incredibly rewarding.

Pay & demand

Pay and demand for this role will appear here, each figure traced to a named authoritative source (e.g. the ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, under the Open Government Licence). We don’t show numbers we can’t attribute.

The ten Future Fluencies

Zavmo analysis

The credential is what you can do today. These are what keep you valuable.

A qualification proves you can do the job as it's defined today. These ten are what decide whether you're still the obvious person for it in five years. They're the capabilities employers are now writing into senior roles faster than people are learning them. Zavmo weaves them through whatever you study, so you come out with both: the credential and the fluency.

The highlighted ones are the Fluencies your role leans on hardest, from how Manager, New Ventures is actually changing. In about two minutes, the free confidence check asks where you stand on each of the ten. That's the whole check, and it's what makes the plan yours rather than generic.

Where it leads

Roles this leads to

Also named as a next step, with no page in the catalogue yet:

  • Head of Product (New Ventures / Incubation)

12The team that's yours

No two people are taught the same way. This is one-to-one, not one-to-many.

Zavmo is a hyper-personalised AI learning platform. Twelve virtual tutors, each with a different way of teaching, and one orchestration agent that picks the right one for the moment. So every single lesson is shaped around you, your role, and the way you learn. Not a course everyone sits through. A conversation built for you, and no one else.

…and nine more, matched to you after your first chat. Meet all twelve

Start free and meet yours

13What it feels like

A conversation, not a course

Because your tutor knows your role, your projects and your last session, learning sounds like this. And it's different for every single person:

Identify Enterprise Venture OpportunitiesLevel 6

Applied to your work in Manager, New Ventures

By completing this unit, learners will understand the nature of enterprise ventures and be able to scan the business environment to identify and analyse potential opportunities.

How the thinking builds
  1. Remember
  2. Understand
  3. Apply
  4. Analyse
  5. Evaluate
  6. Create
An illustration of a Zavmo lesson, built from this role’s own route. The unit, its objective and every criterion above are the awarding body’s own words, not an example.

One to one, not one to many

No two people run this the same way

A course is written once and handed to everyone. This is assembled around you, and keeps changing as it learns you. Five things it reads, and what each one changes.

  1. Your actual work Every lesson is taught against a live piece of your own work, not a worked example from a textbook.
  2. What you already know The first conversation finds your starting point, so you skip what you can already do and spend the time on what you cannot.
  3. The conditions you learn under Not a learning-styles quiz. The evidence does not support those. The dimensions the research does back, read once and used to shape the plan.
  4. How far you got last time It picks up mid-thought. The tutor knows what you said, what you struggled with, and what it asked you to try.
  5. Which tutor suits the moment Twelve of them, each for a different kind of thinking. The one who walks you through a first idea is not the one who stress-tests it.

See how you learn, free. Eight questions, no sign-up. A directional taster; the diagnostic inside Zavmo goes deeper and keeps adapting.

DemonstrateIllustration

Evidenced on your work in Manager, New Ventures

You do not finish by watching something. You finish by showing it on the work you already do, against the measures this job is judged on.

  • Innovation Portfolio Funding SecuredThe total amount of internal funding your team's concepts secure from the Venture Board.In Q2, your team secured £750K for three concepts, pushing the annual total to £1.2M, hitting the mid-range of the target.Secure £500K - £2M in annual funding for the innovation portfolio.
  • Venture Graduation RateThe number of validated business concepts that successfully transition ('graduate') from the innovation lab into a core Business Unit for scaling.By year-end, two of your team's concepts, 'Subscription Box for X' and 'AI-powered Y Service', were successfully handed over to the Retail and Tech BUs respectively.Achieve a graduation rate of 2 ventures into core business units per year.
  • Portfolio Alignment with Strategic PillarsHow well your team's active innovation concepts align with the company's stated 5-year strategic objectives.Your Q3 review showed 85% of active projects directly supported 'Digital Transformation' and 'New Market Expansion' pillars, a clear win.Ensure the innovation portfolio is 80%+ aligned with the company's 5-year strategic pillars.
  • Team Concept-to-Business-Case Conversion RateThe percentage of initial ideas your team explores that successfully progress to a fully validated business case, ready for Venture Board pitch.Out of 12 initial concepts explored in H1, 3 reached the business case stage and secured initial funding, hitting the 25% target.Maintain a 25% concept-to-funded-business-case conversion rate across your team's pipeline.
These are this job's own measures, with its own targets. Nothing is marked evidenced, because nobody has started this yet. Yours would fill in from the work you bring.

Your passport

This isn't a certificate you file away. It's a passport to the life you're designing.

Every credit you earn and every fluency you build adds up: evidence where it counts, carried with you. Zavmo keeps the map: where you are, where you're heading, and the next step, at your pace, around your life. From Manager, New Ventures to Director, Business Concepts & Innovation (L6), and whatever you decide comes after.

Level 5 · in progressAI Fluency→ Director, Business Concepts & Innovation (L6)→ your design
Where this takes you

Your journey as a Manager, New Ventures, is a launchpad. Whether you want to climb the leadership ladder within innovation, transition to a core business leadership role, or even take your skills to the external startup world, this role will equip you with the strategic vision, leadership acumen, and practical experience to make a significant impact. It's a challenging path, but for the right person, it's incredibly rewarding.

See Your Progress GrowIllustration
Manager, New Ventures
  • Lean Startup Methodology (Strategic Application)
  • Human-Centered Design (Guiding & Auditing)
  • Business Model Canvas / Lean Canvas (Portfolio Level)
  • Venture Financial Modelling (Auditing & Stress-Testing)
  • Corporate Venture Governance & Funding
This is your Mind Palace on learn.zavmo.ai. Every skill above comes from this role's own record, not an example borrowed from another job. A node lights up when you evidence it, and what you build stays yours between jobs. That is the part a course cannot do.

14The detail, folded away

Everything else the record holds

The career branches in full, how AI is already showing up in the day-to-day, and the questions people ask about this job. Here when you want them, out of the way while you decide.

Where it leads next, rung by rung

Where it leads

The career path, and where it branches

Manager, New Ventures is a start, not a ceiling. Each step below asks for new skills and hands back more autonomy.

  1. Director, Business Concepts & Innovation (L6)

    3-5 years in the Manager, New Ventures role

    This is a significant jump, moving from managing a team and portfolio to shaping the strategic innovation themes for an entire business unit, managing multiple teams/managers, and overseeing the entire Venture Board governance.

    • Defining and owning the innovation thesis for a major business unit.
    • Integrating innovation outcomes into core business P&L.
    • Leading M&A due diligence for innovation-driven acquisitions.
    • Advanced external ecosystem development and strategic partnerships.

  2. Head of Product (New Ventures / Incubation)

    3-5 years in the Manager, New Ventures role

    This pathway focuses on deepening product leadership within the new ventures space, potentially leading to a role overseeing product strategy for a portfolio of nascent businesses.

    • Defining product vision and strategy for an entire portfolio of new ventures.
    • Leading the integration of new ventures into existing product ecosystems.
    • Advanced user research and product analytics for nascent products.
    • Developing and nurturing product talent within the innovation space.
Working with AI on the job

Working with AI

Where AI is starting to help

Let's be real, managing an innovation team means juggling a lot. From market research to pitch deck reviews, there's always more to do. What if you could give your team back hours every week, letting them focus on the truly creative, human-centric work? That's where AI comes in.

We're not talking about AI replacing your intrapreneurs; we're talking about AI as a powerful co-pilot. For a Manager of New Ventures, this means less time on tedious tasks for your team, more time for deep strategic thinking, coaching, and stakeholder engagement. You'll be able to review more concepts, faster, and give better feedback, because the grunt work is handled by smart tools. Frankly, this is how you stay competitive in the innovation game.

Automated Interview Synthesis (for your team)

Your team spends hours transcribing and summarising customer interviews. With AI tools like Dovetail or Gong, they can automatically transcribe calls, identify key themes, and pull compelling quotes in minutes. This frees them up to focus on deeper insights, not manual data wrangling. You'll get cleaner, faster insights to review.

Accelerated Strategic Market Sizing

Imagine getting a first-draft TAM/SAM/SOM analysis, complete with sources, in a fraction of the time. AI-powered research tools can rapidly scan and synthesise thousands of market reports and competitor filings, giving your team a huge head start. This means you get strategic insights faster, allowing for quicker go/no-go decisions.

Generative Ideation Partner & Concept Refinement

When your team hits a creative block, they can use LLMs as a brainstorming partner. Prompt it with 'Act as a Jobs-to-be-Done expert. What are 10 potential solutions for a customer struggling with [problem]?' This helps generate a wider range of initial ideas and refines existing concepts, pushing the boundaries of their thinking. You'll see more diverse and robust ideas coming through.

Pitch Deck Narrative Drafting & Review

Instead of staring at a blank slide, your team can feed an LLM their raw data, customer quotes, and business model canvas, then ask it to draft a compelling narrative for a 10-slide pitch deck. This drastically cuts down on drafting time, letting them focus on the strategic content. For you, it means reviewing more polished, coherent pitches, making your feedback more impactful.

Common questions

Common questions

How do you become a Manager, New Ventures?

Common routes in include Senior Business Concept Developer (L3) or Lead Intrapreneur (L4) within Zavmo (3-5 years as an L3/L4), Product Manager (New Ventures focus) from another company (7-10 years in Product Management, with a focus on new product launches or 0-to-1 initiatives.) and Management Consultant (Innovation/Strategy focus) (5-8 years at a top-tier consulting firm, specialising in innovation, growth strategy, or new business building.). Times vary with prior experience.

Where can a Manager, New Ventures progress to?

This role can lead on to Director, Business Concepts & Innovation (L6) (3-5 years in the Manager, New Ventures role) and Head of Product (New Ventures / Incubation) (3-5 years in the Manager, New Ventures role), depending on the skills you build.

What level is a Manager, New Ventures in the UK?

This role aligns to RQF Level 5 on the UK framework, a guide to the depth of qualification it maps to, not a hard entry bar.

What new skills matter most for a Manager, New Ventures?

Increasingly, AI-Powered Portfolio Management & Prediction and Ecosystem Orchestration & External Partnership Management. These are the areas where the higher-paid, future-proof work is heading.

The honest bit

You’ve started things before

Most of them were built for a room full of people who aren’t you. A cohort moves on whether or not your week allowed it, and by the third week the thing you’re behind on becomes the reason you stop opening it.

There’s no cohort here, and no timetable to fall behind. Before anything starts, Zavmo asks when you’re sharpest and how long you can realistically sit down for, then builds the sessions around those answers. A bad fortnight changes your pace. It doesn’t put you behind.

And you only pay once you start learning. Searching and planning are free, and you can cancel any time — so the cost of finding out is an afternoon, not a year.

What it costs

Less than one coaching session. Every month.

A single career-coaching hour costs more than a month of this, and it ends when the hour does. Zavmo doesn't. It's £70 a month, about £2.30 a day, for a companion that knows Manager, New Ventures, works on the job you actually do, and keeps going at your pace rather than a timetable's.

  • Searching and planning stay free. You only pay when you start learning.
  • Your credits are yours. Regulated, and they don't vanish when a subscription ends.
  • Cancel any time and billing stops. No notice period, no minimum term.

Your path, personalised

You have the map. Walking it is the part we do together.

This route runs to 5 national skill standards. That is a real journey.

Zavmo shapes a learning experience as unique as you are. It fits how you learn, your pace and the work you already do. Every step stays benchmarked to recognised national standards. That’s the plan for becoming a Manager, New Ventures: personal to you, and it still counts. The first steps are free.

Independent research finds well-designed intelligent tutoring performs nearly as well as one-to-one human tutoring: VanLehn (2011), Educational Psychologist.

A private tutor in the UK averages £35–40 an hour . Zavmo is £70/month.

A real plan on learn.zavmo.ai: Ofqual-regulated units, credits, and a three-month run at your own pace.
Start free No commitment. See your first steps free.

15Where to go from here

Other roles at Level 5

Same depth of qualification, different job. Useful if the work appeals but this particular role does not.

Other roles in Innovation Intrapreneurship

Stay in the field you know and move sideways rather than up.

If you leave this industry

The skills you'll gain here – leading innovation teams, building new ventures, navigating corporate complexity, and securing funding – are highly transferable. You could move into leadership roles in startups, venture capital, management consulting, or other large corporations looking to drive their own innovation agendas. The ability to build new businesses is always in demand, no matter the industry.

Not sure this is the right direction?

Work out what you actually want from work first, then come back and see which roles fit it. Takes about ten minutes.

This role profile is © 2026Growth Engineering Technologies Ltd. Built from UK occupational standards and regulated qualification data, and written for Zavmo.

You're not behind. You're right on time. The shift is only just beginning. Your role won't look the same in two years. Be the one who leads the change, not the one it happens to. Build my plan, free Here's the first ten minutes: a 2-minute confidence check → your personalised roadmap → meet the tutors matched to you. No card, cancel any time. No card. Build your plan, see your roadmap and meet the twelve tutors matched to you. All free. When you're ready to start learning, it's £70 a month, billed monthly. Cancel any time and billing stops.