Ventures Associate

Plug and Play Tech Center • Bentonville, AR

2d • Onsite

About The Position

Plug and Play is hiring a highly structured, analytically rigorous, and entrepreneurial operator to support startup sourcing, market intelligence, problem decomposition, and innovation strategy in industrial technology domains. This role is designed for someone who can take ambiguous corporate problem statements, break them into clear operational and economic components, map relevant market solutions, and build decision frameworks that help rank solutions for customer relevance, pilot readiness, and strategy. The ideal candidate combines consulting-style problem solving, product thinking, market research discipline, and strong communication skills. The person should be comfortable moving between corporate stakeholder discovery, startup evaluation, market landscaping, and recommendation development.

Requirements

• Ability to synthesize ambiguous corporate challenges into structured analytical frameworks.
• Comfort using first-principles thinking to separate root causes from symptoms.
• Ability to turn messy qualitative information into usable taxonomies, models, and decision criteria.
• Ability to scan and synthesize information from funding databases, startup materials, industry reports, CRM systems, and operator interviews.
• Experience building market maps, competitive landscapes, technology taxonomies, and emerging trend analyses.
• Strong judgment on how to convert market signals into actionable recommendations for enterprise customers.
• Ability to evaluate companies across technical, commercial, and strategic dimensions.
• Comfort assessing technical differentiation, product readiness, integration burden, customer traction, deployment risks, and potential pilot outcomes.
• Experience using scoring methodologies or evaluation rubrics to compare startups in a repeatable and defensible way.
• Familiarity with corporate innovation, experimentation, pilot design, and iterative learning.
• Ability to manage cross-functional workstreams across external and internal stakeholders.
• Strong organizational skills with the ability to handle multiple parallel projects in fast-moving environments.
• Working understanding of data platforms, APIs, dashboards, and how enterprise data moves through systems.
• Strong Excel or Google Sheets skills ; comfort with structured data analysis and business case modeling.
• Ability to learn new technical concepts and major industry developments specifically related to AI & robotics quickly and explain them clearly to non-technical audiences.
• Strong written communication for executive updates, startup profiles, market briefs, and recommendation memos.
• Comfort presenting findings to enterprise stakeholders and facilitating discussions between startup teams and corporate operators.
• 1 – 3 years of experience in management consulting, corporate innovation, startup operations, product strategy, venture capital, or a related analytical role.
• Exposure to industrial technology, supply chain, robotics, manufacturing, automation, enterprise software, or adjacent sectors.
• Demonstrated interest in startups, enterprise innovation, and venture investing.
• Experience working in ambiguous, high-ownership environments.

Nice To Haves

• An engineering degree (Industrial, Mechanical, Electrical, Systems, Computer Science, or related field) is preferred but not required; candidates with strong analytical, operational, consulting experience and the ability to quickly understand technical concepts are encouraged to apply.
• Familiarity with AI-enabled research tools and workflow automation is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Translate broad corporate needs into structured problem statements by breaking workflows into jobs-to-be-done, bottlenecks, constraints, adoption friction, and value pools.
• Conduct customer and stakeholder discovery through interviews with enterprise operators, business leaders, and startup teams; synthesize findings into crisp insights and opportunity hypotheses.
• Develop evaluation frameworks to assess startups across technical maturity, deployment complexity, ROI potential, strategic fit, defensibility, and scale potential.
• Produce high-quality deliverables including startup briefs, market landscapes, executive summaries, recommendation memos, and workshop materials.
• Create scoring models and ranking methodologies that support startup shortlisting, customer recommendations, and internal prioritization.
• Coordinate across startups, corporate partners, and internal Plug and Play teams to keep multiple workstreams moving with clear ownership and timelines.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Entry Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed