Head of Origination

Job Description: Head of Origination

Location: London (On Site 3 days a week)

Reports to: Venture Director

Type: Full-time

Please share your CV with: james@form1partners.com

About the Role

The Head of Origination owns the sourcing of the digital innovation pipeline for a major corporate client’s innovation programme, ensuring that pipeline correlates closely with the demand signals the business actually needs. You will have a deep understanding of the UK digital innovation ecosystem and will build and maintain strong relationships externally, with sufficient commercial and technical judgement to triage and assess technologies and to promote innovation challenges effectively to the market.

Key Responsibilities

Ecosystem Development:

• Build and maintain a strong regional innovation ecosystem spanning SMEs, universities, venture capital, accelerators and clusters.
• Represent the programme at ecosystem events and build referral channels across the UK

Demand Mapping:

• Work with business owners to map demand to the most relevant technologies and partners.
• Promote innovation challenges to the market in a way that attracts high-quality, well-matched applicants.

Pipeline Ownership:

• Own pipeline development, progressing opportunities through the funnel and maturing future partners.
• Run triage and assessment calls, complete customer referencing, and keep the CRM current and accurate.

Partner Experience and Handover:

• Lead partners through the pre-contract process as their single relationship point, and take responsibility for providing a positive experience to all applicants.
• Hand each partner cleanly into adoption as they move post-contract into scaling.

Marketing and Engagement:

• Work with Marketing and Comms to promote the programme and maximise engagement across the external ecosystem.

Skills &​ Experience

• 4+ experience sourcing digital technology partners, gained in scouting, venture, business development or ecosystem roles.
• A live network across the UK national technology ecosystem.
• Commercial and technical judgement on early-stage digital products.
• Experience running structured screening or triage of programme applications at volume.
• Experience in both scale-up and large-organisation settings, with the ability to operate at pace.
• Strong communicator and internal stakeholder manager, and great at building and maintaining relationships with external ecosystem players.
• Eligibility for UK security clearance is required: sole UK nationals with 5+ years’ UK residency.

What We Offer

• Competitive salary, bonus, and benefits package.
• Opportunity to shape a growing corporate venturing business within Form1, with high growth potential and a path to leading client engagements.
• Exposure to cutting-edge technologies, the founding management team, and high growth markets, with a huge breadth of activity to engage in.
• Opportunity to join a collaborative and innovative team with a scale-up culture.

About Form1

At Form1, we specialise in building deep, strategic partnerships between the world’s best, most innovative B2B (business to business) technology scale-ups and large corporates. To learn more, visit us at form1patners.com.

Form1 is a scale-up itself and was established 2 years ago by former Capita plc Executives who have a wealth of experience in facilitating partnerships within the tech ecosystem, having founded and grown Capita’s corporate venture arm, Capita Scaling Partners. Alongside our core team, we collaborate with a network of 200+ senior advisors – top executives from major corporates and leading tech experts—who help us drive success for our scale-up and corporate clients.