Bio

I’m an out of the box thinker and a challenge seeker. I love dealing with uncertainty and be surrounded by brilliant people from whom to learn. Currently, I’m leading the Open Innovation team at Telefonica. My mission is to connect the business to external innovation for short and long term value generation, with the focus on capturing and enhancing business opportunities between startups and Telefónica that arise with the arrival of 5G, the internet of things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), Metaverse, advanced data analysis, robotics and cloud computing, among other technologies. To achieve that goal, I’m responsible of the Venture Capital activity at Telefonica Group: • Open Future, the Regional Open Innovation strategy of Telefónica and its private and public partners with over 29 accelerators network in Spain, Perú and Argentina. • Seed stage investments through Wayra (more than 800 startups invested, +250 startups doing business with Telefonica and + 285M€ in revenues generated to those startups) • Growth investments through Telefonica Ventures in start-ups with strategic fit with our business. Telefónica Ventures currently has a portfolio of +30 start-ups invested directly and +170 start-ups invested through our network of Venture Capital funds. Previously I managed Digital Product Units in the cybersecurity space at 11Paths, and also, I led the conceptualization, development and launch of Aura, Telefonica AI where Big Data, Cognitive services and edge technologies are the basics to bring to life new user centric products based on data. It’s my strong belief that Enterprises need more unusual thinkers, resilience to failure and a game changer team. That innovation is a survival philosophy for large organizations and one of the most powerful ways of diversity that corporates can implement. *** * *** * *** My specialties: product ideation & development, graphic communication, design thinking, MVP, agile methodologies, UX/UI, product launch, roadmap development, investments, startups mentoring, Corporate Venture Capital I write my thoughts at https://medium.com/@IreneGL