Director of Academic Experience & Innovation, Business School

Why IE University?

Every story begins with a purpose, and ours has always been about people. Founded in 1973, IE University has continuously raised the bar to drive positive change through education. We believe education is more than a path to professional success; it is a catalyst for personal transformation and meaningful impact. 

At IE University, we place people and their potential at the center of everything we do, empowering individuals to become extraordinary. We encourage bold thinking and foster a culture where innovation, curiosity, and courage lead to real-world impact. Together, we create an environment where talent thrives, and ideas shape the future. 

Our mission 

We support students in developing impact skills to live and lead with positive impact. This ignites a ripple effect: We transform people, who then transform others, systems, society, and, ultimately, our world.  

Our Purpose

To foster positive change.  

Values  

1. Cultivate the humanistic approach.  
2. Empower your entrepreneurial spirit 
3. Cherish the diversity of people, mind, and experience 
4. Drive innovation with a proactive mindset

We are looking for a Director of Academic Experience & Innovation to act as one of the Dean’s principal partners in turning academic strategy into delivered reality. Reporting directly to the Dean of AXI, you will initially lead a focused portfolio expected to include some of the school’s most important academic-transformation projects: framing the thinking behind them and seeing them through to working, high-quality experiences for students. This role asks for a thinker and a doer in the same person. You will shape ideas rigorous enough to defend in front of faculty and staff and then deliver them on time and to a high standard. Neither half is optional.

The initial portfolio is expected to include two substantial areas of work, although the final scope will be defined with the Dean and may evolve as AXI priorities develop.

• The Impact Skills Accelerator (ISA). Impact is one of the three pillars of IE Business School’s Next Best You mission, alongside Your Career and Your Purpose. Impact skills are the skills students need to make things happen in real workplaces, under the pressure and complexity of tough business challenges. The ISA is the experiential, certified program that builds them across foundation, execution, and innovation skills, embedded across the school’s program portfolio. Your job is to take it to its next version: strengthen the methodology and use AI to multiply students’ opportunities to practice and to give them richer, faster feedback.
• Critical and creative intelligence. Design and run the school’s exploration of how agentic AI can strengthen students’ critical thinking and creativity instead of thinking for them, with AI as a sparring partner and critic rather than an answer machine. You will frame the pedagogical approach, shape the student experience, run the first pilot, and build a credible way to measure whether thinking and creativity genuinely improve. The aim is a model the school can defend academically and scale across programs.

• The thinker and the doer. This is the non-negotiable combination. You can sit with a hard conceptual problem, and you can ship on a deadline. Most people lean one way. This role needs both.
• The translator. You move fluently between academic vision, faculty needs, and technical possibility, turning AI’s potential into things students actually use.
• The orchestrator. You coordinate faculty, program teams, technologists, and external partners, keeping them aligned and on time without losing the human relationships that make the work.
• The principled innovator. You care that innovation serves learning, inclusion, and integrity, not novelty for its own sake.
• The AI-fluent practitioner. You are fluent in AI and use it in your own work every day: to produce, to sharpen your thinking, and to manage projects. You also know how to embed it into the design of the ISA and the rest of the portfolio, so that it strengthens learning rather than decorates it.

• Significant experience leading complex academic, innovation, consulting, or transformation projects.
• Master’s degree.
• A track record that shows both sides: conceptual design work and hands-on project delivery.
• Familiarity with instructional design, edtech, and the applied use of AI in learning.
• Fluency in AI as a working tool: using it to produce deliverables, strengthen thinking and decision-making, run projects, and embed it into program and assessment design.
• Written and oral fluency in English and working proficiency in Spanish.
• Experience coordinating many groups and driving change in environments where authority is often indirect.
• Enthusiasm, team spirit, and a strong drive to have an impact.
• Candidates must be EU citizens or hold a valid EU work permit.