We're Hiring - Project Manager

About Ideas Forward

Ideas Forward helps technology transfer offices, incubators, and ecosystem builders across Europe deliver founder support that's designed around what pre-revenue startups actually need.

We draw on firsthand experience building, funding, and coaching startups to create programs that address the core early-stage challenge: founders too often waste time on the wrong problem, or approach the right problem the wrong way.

We design and run entrepreneurship training, coaching, and mentoring programs in partnership with universities, research organizations, corporates, and public innovation bodies. Since 2021, we've worked with 500+ startup founders across 10 European countries and built a trusted network of 20+ institutional partners.

Our mission: help ambitious founders across Europe escape dead ends, skip the theater, and build with a real community behind them.

About the Role

We're looking for a Project Manager to join our team in Thessaloniki. You will play a central role in identifying funding opportunities, developing proposals, and delivering client-funded and EU-funded projects (Horizon Europe, EIT HEI, and similar programs).

The programs you'll help build and run are how we discover the next generation of European tech founders. Every deliverable, every workshop, every partner relationship feeds into that mission. We need someone who can navigate EU reporting requirements with precision but who also cares deeply about whether the programs we're delivering are genuinely useful to the founders going through them.

You'll work closely with the founders of Ideas Forward, our Head of Innovation Programs, and our network of institutional partners across Europe. The right person is an experienced project manager who is comfortable managing international consortia, but who is also curious about the technologies, markets, and founders we work with.

Responsibilities

• Spot opportunities and grow the project portfolio: identify calls, shape concepts, support consortium building, and contribute to proposal writing.
• Lead day-to-day project delivery: keep activities, milestones, and deliverables on time and on standard.
• Own project planning: workplans, task coordination, dependencies, risk tracking, and corrective actions.
• Coordinate internal teams and external partners: keep everyone aligned, informed, and accountable.
• Run project routines: meetings, workshops, reviews, agendas, minutes, and action tracking — including occasional travel.
• Draft and quality-check deliverables, technical reports, and documentation per EU and Grant Agreement requirements.
• Ensure compliance: documentation, visibility and dissemination, and adherence to programme rules.
• Improve how we run projects: sharpen templates, processes, tools, and knowledge-sharing.
• Connect programs to founder outcomes: make sure deliverables create real value for founders, not just tick deliverable boxes.

Qualifications & Experience

Must-haves:

• 5+ years of project management experience, ideally in innovation, technology, or startup ecosystems
• Experience managing EU-funded projects and involvement in proposal writing and successful applications
• Bachelor's degree in business, engineering, management, or equivalent
• Excellent written and verbal communication in both English and Greek
• Experience working with international consortia and multicultural teams
• Demonstrated ability to manage multiple projects concurrently with competing priorities
• Strong organizational skills and attention to detail

Nice-to-haves:

• Master's degree or certification in project management (e.g. PMP, PRINCE2)
• Experience in startup support, technology transfer, or innovation ecosystem development
• An understanding of what early-stage tech founders actually need, ideally from having worked closely with startups, or having been part of one

What We Offer

• Working on impactful projects that change the trajectory of early-stage startup founders
• Being part of a small, very experienced team where your contribution is visible and your initiative matters
• Opportunities for professional growth inside a company that is itself growing
• Access to a community of 500+ founder alumni and a very broad ecosystem of partners
• Very competitive salary

Interested?

If this sounds like the right fit for you, we'd love to hear from you. Tell us about your experience and why you want to join Ideas Forward.