504, 2022
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She loves family, writing, art, and sharing experiences of her work with anybody who is looking for help.
Juana-Catalina has worked for the last two decades in different industries providing her expertise including fast-moving Consumer Goods, Financial Services, Cloud Storage services, Mobile Services, Digital Identities, and Digital Transformation of businesses across Asia-Pacific, Europe, Latin America, and North America.
Strategy, Innovation & Marketing have been the strong suits of Juana-Catalina, creating value and developing new offers along the way in the industries she has been associated with. She helps startups, intrapreneurs, and other innovators as an expert in innovation and disruptive business models to accelerate their development and growing their businesses by streamlining their innovation processes.
She holds a Bachelor in Engineering, M.S in Marketing, MBA and has a corporate innovation certificate from Stanford’s LEAD program.
Story
Fresh out of the university with an engineering degree, I joined the marketing and innovation world as an analyst. My first mission was amazing as I was asked to explore new opportunities in the home remodeling market. I discovered a world of families looking to renew their homes and architects willing to help these families. I realized that innovation was the way to go and found new ideas for every kind of market by putting all pieces together. My boss at that time (one of the best mentors I ever had) taught me how to decrypt all the elements of a business ecosystem and empathize not only with the end-users but with all actors in order to develop a successful innovative model on paper as well as on the field.
This was just the start of my innovation journey as I later moved into financial services where I was in charge of communication and was always on the lookout for ways to communicate in the simplest, most effective manner with customers. The road later leads me to Fast Moving consumer goods and most recently in the technology sector, where I developed new programs as a consultant across different regions in areas as mobile payment, digital identity, cloud storage, and mobile retail services.
One day I got a call from a friend who asked me if I could take a look at his new venture. I spent 2 hours with him reviewing his project and asking questions about his customers and their needs. I also inquired about his competitors, and the business model he would like to adopt. However, during the meeting, he kept asking me “OK so how can I get some investors?” I insisted that before that he needs to review his value proposition, his numbers, define a go-to-market and validate the assumptions he has for his business model; He was surprised as he was about to launch the first batch of his product without any validation of his business theory.
At this moment, I started to discuss with other entrepreneurs and innovators and I realized that so many are getting the whole idea of innovation wrong due to lack of resources and guidance.
Innovation is not a piece of cake but over the years I have learned that walking down this road without support is extremely hard. It is good to learn from our mistakes, but what about getting accessible advice, support, tools? These experiences had a profound influence on me and the people I worked with,
So, I decided that there should be a way to share all my passion for Innovation as I believe that with the right guidance, we can all do it.
