Innovation Lead (Intrapreneur) - Full-time / Part-time

About the team:

Celonis Labs is the innovation engine of Celonis: an independent, rapid-innovation unit within Celonis focused on pioneering entirely new business models and novel platform capabilities. Merging the radical agility, clean-slate freedom, and speed of a pre-seed startup with the massive market leverage of a global tech giant, we turn wild hypotheses into high-impact, market-ready realities. This is a unique environment where high-agency builders have the mandate, resources, and speed required to turn blank-canvas ideas into next-generation enterprise solutions.

The role

As Innovation Lead, you will shape the direction of innovation across Celonis Labs, creating and championing a diverse portfolio that spans exploratory prototypes, new business models, and partner solutions. Your mandate is to scan the horizon for disruptive high-potential opportunities and build compelling cases that get stakeholders and teams alike excited to build the next big thing.

But getting people excited is only the spark.

Bringing a founder’s mindset, you have the radical autonomy to hunt for paradigm-shifting concepts, backing your vision with intellectual rigor and sound hypotheses.

The work you’ll do

• Source and curate a rich pipeline of disruptive ideas, applying first-principles thinking to isolate high-potential opportunities past the “cool idea” phase and pitch them to win the backing required to activate them as active Labs projects
• Rigorously pressure-test your core assumptions around market feedback, technical feasibility, and strategic fit to either ruthlessly prune weak ideas early, or seamlessly transition your concepts into execution
• Command executive attention and skip the slide-deck graveyard. Leverage AI capabilities and rapid mock-ups to bring abstract concepts to life instantly, turning a theory into a tangible, interactive experience that cuts through the noise and commands attention from our customers
• Go straight to the decision-makers within our massive global network of Fortune 500 customers to build your own high-trust advisory circle. Cultivate a tight feedback loop for radical ideas with these visionary allies, establishing the high-level buy-in and trusted sounding board needed to shape and validate disruptive concepts in absolute confidence

The qualifications you need

• Hands-on startup experience and a proven track record of building and launching products from scratch within the B2B software domain—whether as a venture-backed founder, co-founder, founder's associate, or intrapreneurial product manager
• A demonstrated ability to bring abstract concepts to life alongside cross-functional teams rallying them behind a shared vision through product empathy and collaborative drive
• Strong trend acumen and technical literacy that gives you a natural foresight for emerging technological shifts and a deep empathy for software architecture
• High comfort with radical ambiguity, thriving in unstructured, rapidly shifting environments where, instead of waiting for a map, you think like a founder and are excited by the opportunity to draw the map yourself
• An impatient bias for action and a "can-do" attitude, demonstrating exceptionally high agency and leading by example to actively getting things done and drive momentum
• Exceptional communication and persuasion skills, with comfort pitching and building C-level relationships in both English and German. You build trust through clear, compelling narratives whether public speaking on a stage, inspiring executives, or whiteboarding with engineers
• Resilience and brutal intellectual honesty guided by data over personal ego. You pressure-test your own assumptions, kill weak concepts early, and treat a customer's "no" as a constructive metric and a direct path to the right "yes."

Why you'll love working here

• True Autonomy: We despise corporate theater and micromanagement. You will have the absolute freedom to explore wild, clean-sheet ideas, design your own discovery cycles, and call your own shots on where to focus your energy.
• Zero to One, Constantly: If you love the thrill of the starting line, the rigor of proving hypotheses wrong, and hate the monotony of maintaining legacy software, this is your paradise
• Real Resource Backing: No bootstrapping required. You find the sparks; we have a talented builder team ready to build the fire