Juana-Catalina Rodriguez

Intrapreneurship

Fixed Vs. Growth Mindset – power up your innovation potential to outsmart the hare as the tortoise did

8 June 2021 No Comments

Do you remember the famous fable of “The Hare and the Tortoise” [1]? How the hare, being naturally born faster, lost a won battle from the tortoise and set an example for the world to make conflicting interpretations? As children, “The Tortoise and the Hare” fable has always been one of my favorites. But there is still a lesson in that story that I didn’t grasp completely, or maybe I did—the prominent portrayal of the growth mindset. If the tortoise were anywhere like most of us, he would have instantly thought, “I’m too slow to win the race with the

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The art of asking, from time to time we all need a little help

8 September 2020 5 Comments

Some years ago, I had an excellent unplanned asking experience as part of negotiation training. The mission was to venture out and asking for a discount on anything, ranging from buying a coffee cup from Starbucks or a product at the local supermarket. The key to the proposition here was to ask for something that nobody expected. I come from a country where negotiation is very common. As a little girl, I always used my mother’s customers on the lookout for a discount in her store in Colombia. In some regions, asking for a discount may be an expected norm,

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Russell Rogers, innovation trailblazer taught us how to thrive in the corporate world by sharing stories, keeping momentum and collaborating

24 June 2020 No Comments

During my last visit to Silicon Valley, I ran into Russell Rogers whose professional life has focused on leading and driving innovation with a strong emphasis on design thinking and change management. Through his journey, he has ruffled feathers at Humana, Samsung, DuPont, and most recently Blue Shield driving innovation. He also started a couple of startups spun out of the MIT Media Lab. He has graduate degrees and a significant number of certificates in business, technology, innovation, public health, and leadership from Cornell, Harvard, MIT, Yale, Stanford, and UC Berkeley. He is about to complete another degree at Columbia in

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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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If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. Howard teaches us how to transform a company from the inside!

12 June 2020 No Comments

Last month, I had a great opportunity to interview Howard who shared his passion for finding new ways of doing things, innovation, and continuous learning. The keys to his success as a change agent by helping others to grow. Howard works in one of the largest insurance and asset management companies in Europe. His company was part of a well-known financial group that spin-off its insurance and asset management business in 2014. After the 2008 financial crisis, Howard’s company has been facing changing market conditions not to mention the recent pandemic. First, the amount of regulation increased considerably, which bloated

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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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6 heart-wrenching lessons from companies that failed to handle disruption

28 August 2019 No Comments

Falling off the perch is not a nice feeling as an individual or a company. However, falling is a trait of warriors and rising after a fall is a hobby for champions. For this to happen, an individual or a company needs to be sitting right up to the pile of all other competitors for a number of years to lose track and fall so viciously, that the fall usually ends up in a bankruptcy file. For a new business, there can be a number of reasons causing disruptions, however, a seasoned business is not easily brought to the ground. Let’s

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3 Things Greg”the techo” teach us about intrapreneurship

21 August 2019 No Comments

Greg is an engineer, native of Singapore. He has been working abroad for the last 15 years which gave him an international perspective and open mindset. Greg has been part of the corporate incubator team within his well-known tech company. During the last 5 years, he has been providing his technical expertise to support more than 10 innovation projects. Greg is a true innovator, known within his team as “the techo”. During our talk, he shared openly his experiences and learnings of how he evolved from a pure technical innovator towards seeing technology as a means to answer customer needs. The

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Why Do You Need To Hone Your Critical Thinking Skills As Intrapreneur?

14 August 2019 No Comments

Are you wondering why you need to hone your critical thinking skills as an intrapreneur? In this blog, we are going to discuss the importance of sharpening critical thinking skills and benefits. Josh’s Story reminded us of the importance of honing critical thinking skills and so my 5 years old son did. We were reading his goodnight story that happens to have an episode of a knight fighting with some terrible monster. Of course, the knight won the battle. My son asked me: Mom, and the monster died? Without thinking twice I answered, “no my dear, he will recover.” He

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6 lessons learned from our coffee talk with Josh “serial intrapreneur”​ and all about his passion and persistence

31 July 2019 No Comments

Today’s blog post is going to be all about Josh, ‘a Geek’. Josh is an accomplished intrapreneur who has launched so many projects. One of his first success is integrated into a business unit and represents more than €30 Million in revenue per year. At first, it wasn’t easy, but Josh persisted. In this blog, you will learn about the techniques Josh has used to innovate projects and what has made him a successful intrapreneur.

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