Juana-Catalina Rodriguez

Juana Rodriguez

10 key strategies to help entrepreneurs fight through the COVID-19 crisis

28 April 2020 No Comments

Just a few days into the lockdown, I got a call from Sophie, she was furious and frustrated as she has been working for the last year to develop a wonderful “atelier” to share her passion for handcrafts. Her place was just launched in January, but after less than 1 month of operations, everything was suddenly stopped. On another side, there was a touch of mixed feelings as she was also thankful to be safe at home with her family in these uncertain times. During the first two weeks of the lockdown, Sophie was dumbstruck, as a solo entrepreneur she

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How to prepare for an empathy interview that dig out the real user experience and emotions

27 April 2020 No Comments

Empathy interviews are the basic cornerstone of Design Thinking, by understanding another person’s point of view, thoughts, feelings, and motivations; we can identify the choices that a person makes and his or her behavioral traits. This helps us to create a solution that answers the needs of our customers. Therefore, it is of essence that we understand their stories, as they reveal personal insights and feelings that we can just be aware of by interacting with our end users. All this can be achieved through an empathy interview. This article will give you the details about how to prepare a

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COVID-19 today fear and confusion. Afterthought, time to learn, adapt and help!

9 April 2020 No Comments

I’m writing this from my home in France, stuck in a Hollywood-ish lockdown for the last four weeks, waiting for the hero of the movie to break the rut. We do not have a complete understanding of what is happening and what will happen in the near future. My 5-year-old son has even learned the term COVID-19 or better “Mom, it is is because of the coronavirus”, sometimes he explains to me. This morning he came up with a baffling question, “Mom when he will be able to go back to school?”  This is a question, one that cannot be

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Avnish Sabharwal teaches us how to enable innovation : curiosity and ability to take risks

22 January 2020 No Comments

Last week I had a coffee talk with an innovation leader, Avnish Sabharwal. Avnish shared his expertise and experience of handling strategic alignment for corporate innovation initiatives, the challenges of open innovation and the keys to enable tangible benefits through digital transformation and disruption. For the past six years, he has been leading strategy, investment, and acquisitions as part of Accenture’s Open Innovation program for India. This includes collaborating with start-ups, VCs, PEs, accelerators, incubators, industry bodies, as well as academia for Accenture Ventures. I had the opportunity to pick his brain about intrapreneurship, innovation, and disruption. The round-up of my

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The difference between a great idea and a success, start with your strategy to create and capture value FIRST

15 January 2020 3 Comments

Imagine for a minute that you’re one of the Airbnb founders that have put up an exciting story for the new economy and platforms era. Their story is about iterating to find the right strategy to disrupt an existing market with a compelling value proposition. A mix of opportunity, customer insights and an innovative way of solving a unique century-old problem. Just think, consumers were looking for an affordable place to stay anywhere on the planet and people who owned extra space in their home wanted to make some extra money and Boom came Airbnb as a solution. We could

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The ten Open Innovation trends to keep an eye in 2020

9 December 2019 No Comments

Technology is advancing faster than humankind could have ever imagined, which has forced an evolution in consumer demands at a rapid pace. These trends are driving a necessity to innovate, disrupt, and reshape businesses all over the world. These new dynamics are defining how we work, relate, communicate, and learn. Incumbents are becoming more vulnerable to disruptors that are challenging their products, services, and business models. I have been interviewing leading innovators and intrapreneurs across the world and disruption & innovation are two of the most important strategy builders for large corporations to medium-sized businesses and startups. One of the

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Three compelling keys for driving sustainable growth through human-centered design

18 October 2019 No Comments

In our previous article, we described design thinking as a systematic approach to solve a problem, as a process that starts with a deep understanding of customer “empathy” as a fundamental step to ideate a better solution for our customers. The design thinking approach acknowledges that we don’t need to get it right the first time. It is “iterative” moving from prototyping, to testing, then we can go back to our customers to validate our hypothesis and assumptions and starting over again.  As we are looking for real innovation that generates growth. The inner understanding of our customers will boost creativity.

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Empathy, the keystone of Design Thinking, techniques to succeed and why do we fail to be user-centric?

28 September 2019 No Comments

In our previous article, we described how design thinking built upon empathy and intuition to identify critical user requirements and define imaginative ways to resolve their needs. In this post, we are going deeper into this user-centered process as the keystone to conceive and create a successful innovative product, service, or process. We see how several companies are using tools like Big data and AI to offer solutions to ever-changing user requirements based on technological advancements. They have cracked the code of customization and believe that every customer is unique and a single solution does not fit all. On the

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In the new customer-centric era, what all the design thinking fuss is about?

19 September 2019 No Comments

Last year right in the middle of a design thinking corporate training, a friend and colleague asked me “ Juana, what all this fuss about design thinking now? This whole is not a new concept as we had implemented this method ourselves while digging it out in the fields of South Africa, some 10 years ago” she said.  As part of our intrapreneur’s series we are now moving into design thinking principles and tools, let’s start by digging into some reasons what all the design thinking fuss is about? Gone Is The Era Of The Product For the past century,

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