- PhD in organic chemistry at Universitat Ramon Llull (Barcelona).
- Post-doctoral studies in chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Alberta (Edmonton, Canada).
- Advanced management studies at IESE (Universidad de Navarra).
My professional background.
Until I turned 30+, I had a passion for academic research in chemistry and biochemistry. At some point, though, I decided to move to new grounds and I turned my attention to the world of Corporate R&D ... where I soon discovered that university degrees don't buy you immediate competence in project and people management.
After some time in the pharmaceutical industry (Lacer), I joined one of the most successful companies in Fast Moving Consumer Goods (Henkel), where I spent more than 13 years. Starting at the Marketing Department of Henkel Ibérica, I held subsequent positions as International R&D New Product Developer, Innovation Manager, and Director of the the local R&D Unit of the Division of Detergents for Spain and Portugal. I owe to Henkel most of what I have learned in project and people management.
Later on, my time at Lubrizol (Berkshire Hathaway) as Global Strategic Marketing Manager gave me additional opportunities to put into practice advanced management skills. Thanks also to Lubrizol for those wonderful years working on Global Business Development!
After finally stepping down from the corporate world, I decided to concentrate on sharing my experience with future young professionals, and since 2016 I'm teaching Innovation and Entrepreneurship at IQS School of Management, in Barcelona, Spain.
My vision with this blog.
My primary goal with this blog is to help professionals with a technical background that, like myself, will make the transition from scientits to managers within their companies. However, anyone working in Innovation and New Product Deveopment may find here useful tools and insights for their dayly work.
A final thought.
We live in an exciting ever-changing world, where the amount of information generated by unit of time, and the speed of change has no precedents in history. What we learned yesterday will most likely be just history by tomorrow, and I'm convinced that many of the subjects that I share with you in this blog may soon be obsolete. So let's get ready to challenge the current models, tools and theories, and embrace the new ones as soon as they show up. Be it either as an environmental adaptative Darwinian evolution, or as a Schumpeteer's Creative Destruction event.
