HULT Innovation Olympics Speaker Bios
Our previous sponsors will share lessons learned as well as real world experiences from their participation in the Innovation Olympics.
Please join us on Wednesday, October 16th at 4 p.m. EDT for a dialogue with a rare gathering of executives from Verizon, Iron Mountain, Boehringer Ingelheim and Natura. They will share their experiences in deploying student competitions, like the Hult Innovation Olympics, to jump-start innovation initiatives inside their organizations.
Ronald Jonash, Professor, Hult International Business School and
Senior Partner, IXL Center for Innovation, Excellence and Leadership
Ron is currently a senior partner at the IXL Center. He is on the faculty of the Hult International Business School, a partner at a venture capital firm, and on the Advisory board of Arthur D. Little. He was a senior partner of the Monitor Group where he founded and led their Innovation practice and was founder of IMI (Innovation Management Inc.). For 20 years he was the managing director of the Technology and Innovation Management Practice for Arthur D. Little worldwide. He was also Chief Innovation Officer and served on their Technology Investment Board and Management Education Institute Board.
Ron’s specialties are the strategic management of innovation, technology and R&D to create and capture maximum value. With degrees in Economics and Engineering Systems from Princeton University where he also received his Master’s Degree in Architecture and Design, he has led numerous executive leadership and development programs at major companies and has been a visiting lecturer at Rice, Wharton and Columbia universities and the Hult International Business School.
José Escobar,
Managing Principal, Global Strategy and Innovation Group at Verizon Business
While his original background is Mechanical Engineering, Jose’s experience in consulting, business development, project management, research, and financial analysis has served him well in his role as Managing Principal at Verizon Business. Jose has fluently combined the aforementioned talents to design the road-map and strategies required to identify and organically build out the next generation of innovative products and services. At the same time, he also builds out the business by investing, negotiating, and executing on multimillion dollar contracts and strategic external partnerships.
Among Jose´s biggest achievements is to be the Co-founder of the Hult Global Case Challenge (recently re-branded Hult Prize), a student competition with the aim of solving global problems through business. Today the Hult Global Case Challenge is one of the most prestigious case competitions in the world.
Geoff Nesnow,
Former Director, Ideation and Market Strategy at Iron Mountain
Geoff Nesnow is a passionate evangelist, coach, inventor and transformation catalyst. His “outside-the-box” thinking, no-nonsense style and ability to ask the right questions have served as the catalyst for breakthrough innovation and disruptive technology initiatives, driving revenue and building platforms for future growth. Geoff Nesnow is best known as a “builder” − of products, processes, people, new ventures, and customer/client relationships.
At Iron Mountain, Geoff built an innovation platform and processes that lead to the identification of more than100 potential growth opportunities, built business plans and obtained funding for over 20 new ventures, of which 8 are currently in development or in the market, representing over $1B in defined opportunity, $40M in investment and more than $30M in fast-growing revenue.
Stephan Klaschka,
Director of Global Innovation Management at Boehringer Ingelheim
Stephan Klaschka is an awarded innovation intrapreneur, entrepreneur and executive consultant with over 20 years of international work and management experience in Europe, Asia-Pacific and the Americas. Throughout his international career, he founded several businesses as an entrepreneur and worked as a consultant to academia, government and international pharmaceutical firms.
Stephan currently serves as a Director of Innovation Management at Boehringer Ingelheim, a privately held FORTUNE Global 500 company, where he built external academic and cross-disciplinary networks including a successful innovation lab and incubator. Under his leadership, the innovation project portfolio continuously returns a high multi-million ROI. He successfully scouts emerging technologies and develops disruptive value-adding services as well as new business models for Boehringer Ingelheim worldwide.
Romulo Zamberlan,
US Innovation Center Manager at Natura
Romulo has dedicated several years of his career in the packaged-goods industries, having worked for top companies such as Avon, Unilever and for the last 7 years, working for Natura (the market leader in Brazil to the beauty sector and considered the 10th most innovative company in the world by Forbes – 2013).
While at Natura, he established an Innovation operation in the Boston Area and he is currently the Innovation Hub manager at this office. In this role, he leverages both his technical and managerial expertise, allowing him to amass and contribute new ideas and new perspectives to both Natura and his innovation management career.
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