Juana-Catalina Rodriguez

Innovation

5 most common jobs-to-be-done challenges and how to pave the way for successful disruption

24 August 2020 No Comments

As we have seen in previous disruption posts, companies such as Blockbuster, Kodak, Blackberry, Nokia, customer Jobs-to-be-done was the hard-learned lesson that product managers, developers, marketers, and innovators need to adopt to enter a new paradigm about the real meaning of value-for-customers. The value of a product is not about the physical features only. Instead, it is the ability of what the product does for the end-customer. Hence, it is the need of the hour that innovators start producing products that help customers achieve their goals and objectives; in other words, make their lives better. ’Jobs To Be Done’ provides a way of understanding

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Honing on Jobs-To-Be-Done? lead your way into disruptive innovation

9 July 2020 No Comments

“People don’t simply buy products or services; they hire them to make progress in specific circumstances.” Clayton Christensen During the pandemic lockdown, we adopted a dog. The newcomer spent hours trying to catch the little lizards in the garden without any luck. I guess he could wish for an easier or faster way to catch them, but he enjoyed the journey. I remember the last time we had a lizard in the house. I took some paper and Tupperware and caught the lizard to put it safely back in the garden. As we live in a rural area and this

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Britt, serial Intra and entrepreneur up-close and upfront on how she is managing change and innovation

17 June 2020 No Comments

In this interview, we have the opportunity to pick the brains of a brilliant intrapreneur and serial entrepreneur. Her name is  Maj-Britt Kjær Sørensen, she lives and works in Denmark. She has several feathers in her cap that includes changing companies through innovation (on the inside-out), teaching intrapreneurship at a school, and working as a consultant for change management and innovation. Our paths crossed on the Stanford LEAD program last year and now she is a full-time agent of corporate change. She is also a serial entrepreneur at heart with a solid background in marketing and innovation. She had the

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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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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 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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Real-life lessons about failure, the key to grow and innovate!

4 September 2019 No Comments

During an interview in the past, in a beautiful Paris evening, I was going on and on about the peaks of my success during my career. The interviewer then threw me off with a surprising question “So, tell me about your failures?” For a moment, my impulsive brain wanted to answer that I have never had a failure but then the truth came out in the form of the evident “ any success story was preceded by a series of failures”. The astonishment on his face was greater than the fresh evening air as he expected another answer, maybe! This

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