Experience

Andres Jordan, CURiosity DRIVEN BUSINESS BUILDER, LIFE LEARNER, Mentor, DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION ADVOCATE, Design Thinker.

Since I was a kid growing up abroad, I was exposed to many diverse cultures which awaken my awareness to the immense power of diverse and creative minds.

I also earned about how powerful individual human experiences can contribute to positive change from my father’s storytelling as he related stories of his global travels as an agriculture engineer.

One particular story I will never forget involved him staying overnight at a farmer’s house in the jungle of Colombia. During dinner, he spied a snake on the rafters. The snake proceeded to approach the table during dinner whereby it rested its head on the table. The farmer, calmly and with no concern, gave the snake some food after which the snake simply sundered away. It was the farmer’s pet snake, as it turns out.

Understanding and learning from another person’s journey’s is at the center of my core. To this day, I leverage those twin beliefs to drive change and improve people’s lives wherever I can. Answering customer’s ever-changing needs started with my first job as a customer service rep ideating and leading an effort to automate the production of customer outage reports from days to hours.

My success principles:

- Lead via an ego-less posture

- Nurture positively-driven innovation cultures and all-is-possible environments

- Scale new products from idea to launch leveraging tech and quick-to-market imperatives

- Drive new discoveries by deeply understanding end-user needs utilizing design thinking and human-centered research

- Leverage data to iterate and quickly pivot based on newfound insights

Selected wins:

- Co-founded innovation lab for $80 Billion global company resulting in accelerated product development cycles and new products in margin-rich mobile media markets

- Innovated across global markets and cultures resulting in new ventures in technology and media markets leading to new revenues in new industries

- Authored innovation playbook leveraging corporate venturing infrastructure and startup partners in the buildout of new products and platforms

- Introduced, mentored and educated teams in the use of design thinking as a driver of strategy leading to changes in corporate structure designed to accelerate understanding of customer needs

- Innovated new hybrid internet connectivity product leading to two new 5-year contracts worth $10M.

- Leveraged stakeholder management experience to create new data analytics capability for strategic decision making and to drive new sales.

What my customers have said (including colleagues and team members):

- “You inspired me…”(By far the complement I value the most from a colleague I mentored in UK)

- “I learn from you every time we talk…” (Colleague as I was helping her deal with a hard patch in her life)

- “Thank you for listening…” (Active listening (perspective taking) is a real skill and is appreciated when done well)

- “Stay close to him, you will learn from him” ( Chief Sales Officer advising a colleague)

- “You have inspired us to push forward and innovate” (a client in the US government after a seminar on cultures and innovation best practices)

- “ You are a thinker…” (A startup partner as we were working on a go to market together)

- “The professor…” ( An executive describing my approach of using data to back up why a new product direction should be undertaken).

Clients

Andres’ clients range from research institutes such as Fraunhofer to incubators such as Founder Institute, where he is a mentor and advisor, to China Telecom, the largest telecom operator in the world. His passion for innovation ecosystems began in 2006 when he co-founded an innovation lab for a $1 billion business unit of Deutsche Telekom/T-Mobile. In his charge as VP of Innovation he deployed a model of his creation, which he continues to improve from emerging best practices and new learnings. His industry leading efforts have been recognized via collaborations with universities including UNAM (Mexico), GMU, USC Marshall and via invitations to speak at prestigious organizations such as The Milken Institute, UNDP and Frost & Sullivan.

History

Andres has lived in and worked with European, Asian and Latin American cultures. Experiences that have allowed him to amass considerable know-how at the cross roads of innovation and cultural dynamics. He is an active public speaker, thought leader and author. He holds a Masters in International Business, and degrees in Finance/Business and liberal arts. Additionally, he holds multiple certifications including a Design Thinking for Innovation certification from University of Virginia (UVA). Andres is also an adjunct professor at GMU where he teaches design thinking to business school seniors. Currently he is completing a book on the emboldening impacts of innovation ecosystems. He resides in Alexandria, VA, in the Washington DC, USA Region.