Senior Specialist, Innovation

The Senior Specialist, Innovation plays a critical role in advancing Neogen’s pipeline of high-impact innovations across Food Safety and Animal Health. This individual translates unmet customer needs into validated concepts and scalable solutions, applying disciplined innovation methodologies to reduce risk, accelerate learning, and increase the probability of commercial and technical success.

The role operates at the intersection of science, technology, customer insight, and business strategy and partners extensively across R&D, Product Management, Commercial, Regulatory, Quality, Operations, and digital teams.

Lead structured discovery efforts to uncover unmet needs across food and animal safety laboratories, manufacturing environments, farms, and veterinary settings

Plan, conduct, and synthesize voice-of-customer research, field observations, and stakeholder interviews to identify customer pain points and jobs to be done

Translate qualitative and quantitative insights into clearly articulated need statements with defined users, use contexts, and measurable success criteria

Assess unmet needs against strategic fit, customer value, regulatory constraints, and Neogen’s core capabilities to support portfolio prioritization

Develop early value hypotheses, adoption assumptions, and problem framing to guide downstream innovation activities

Partner with cross-functional teams to generate, evaluate, and refine solution concepts spanning physical products, assays, instruments, digital tools, workflows, and service models

Collaborate with R&D, Engineering, Data Science, Quality, Regulatory, and Commercial teams to explore technical feasibility and differentiation

Build and test early concepts through experiments, prototypes, pilots, and customer feedback loops to reduce technical, usability, and market risk

Define use cases, workflows, and system-level concepts that integrate hardware, consumables, software, and data

Support intellectual property strategy by contributing to invention disclosures and freedom-to-operate discussions

Prepare concepts for progression through Neogen’s innovation governance process by clearly documenting desirability, feasibility, and viability evidence

Partner with Product Management, Operations, Quality, and Regulatory teams to support scale-up, validation, and launch readiness

Identify risks related to adoption, workflow disruption, training burden, or regulatory approval and recommend mitigation strategies

Ensure customer value propositions are clear, evidence-based, and aligned with real-world usage and purchasing drivers

Support the transition from innovation into development or commercialization while preserving the original customer intent

Serve as a connector across Innovation, R&D, Commercial, Regulatory, Quality, Operations, and other functions to promote alignment and shared understanding

Plan and facilitate structured innovation workshops, ideation sessions, and decision reviews

Lead through influence by clearly communicating insights, trade-offs, and recommendations to senior stakeholders

Serve as a trusted thought partner to scientific and technical teams, helping frame problems before solutions are pursued

Contribute to the continuous improvement of Neogen’s innovation processes, tools, and decision criteria

Support portfolio-level thinking by identifying patterns across customer needs, technologies, and market segments

Help ensure innovation investments align with Neogen’s strategic focus on high-impact, scalable Food Safety and Animal Health solutions

Track and analyze innovation learnings and outcomes to inform future opportunity areas and capability development

Champion disciplined, customer-centered innovation practices across the organization

Mentor project teams and junior contributors on needs-driven innovation, experimentation, and evidence-based decision-making

Promote a learning mindset that values early insight, rapid feedback, and thoughtful risk-taking

Strong customer orientation and curiosity

Ability to work through ambiguity and bring structure to complex problems

Strong analytical, critical-thinking, and problem-solving skills

Ability to translate scientific and technical information into clear business and customer insights

Strong facilitation, communication, and stakeholder-management skills

Ability to influence without direct authority

Strong collaboration skills across technical and non-technical functions

Ability to balance customer needs, technical feasibility, business value, and risk

Strong organizational skills and ability to manage multiple priorities simultaneously

Increase the quality and clarity of opportunities entering Neogen’s innovation pipeline

Reduce downstream development risk by validating customer needs and concepts early

Accelerate the delivery of differentiated solutions that improve food safety, animal health, and customer productivity

Strengthen Neogen’s reputation as a science-driven, customer-focused innovation leader

At Neogen we believe that taking care of our employees allows them to do their best work. When you join our team, you'll enjoy competitive benefits and the opportunity to make a meaningful difference every day.

At Neogen, our mission is to protect the world’s food supply. From inside the farm gate to our dinner plates, our products and solutions help protect people, animals, and the global food supply.

Joining Neogen means becoming part of a global organization where your ideas, expertise, and curiosity can help shape the next generation of food safety and animal health solutions.

From inside the farm gate to our dinner plates, Neogen protects the world’s food supply. Through a variety of animal healthcare products, to food safety solutions for dangerous bacteria, allergens, toxins, drug residues and much more, Neogen is there — and you can be too.