IIEX APAC 2024 Speaker Interview with Val Pastrana of Mondelēz International

Disclaimer: opinions represented here are personal and do not represent those of Mondelēz International. Join us March 5-6, 2024 for the event. Find more information on IIEX APAC 2024 here!

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Percival Pastrana, Senior Director at Mondelēz International and speaker at this years IIEX APAC event, emphasizes the importance of focusing on culture and basic skills rather than solely relying on advanced tools for innovation. He believes innovation teams can improve results by sticking to the fundamentals and building empathy through consumer research. Pastrana creatively combines traditional methods with technology and AI to enhance research and derive greater value.

While research technology and automation bring benefits, he highlights the importance of depth, rigor, and newness of insights. Pastrana sees AI and tech as valuable in unlocking insights, improving business outcomes, and avoiding pitfalls. He also encourages the exploration of Horizon 3 initiatives to provide actionable insights for future realities. He urges professionals to approach innovation with a focus on foundational skills and consumer empathy.

Question #1: Give us a brief peek into your talk. What are the key insights and take aways?

As an innovation leader, I’m fascinated by the proliferation of many new tools (AI, agile, tech etc) that many claim will upend the way companies will innovate, and hopefully significantly improve innovation results for those who adopt them. In my talk, I’d like to share a few reflections from 2 decades of innovation experience that provokes further introspection and discussion on this topic. 

What I had learned is that we don’t need to look for the shiniest and newest research toys - everything we need to know to innovate better, we already know. Ironically, we somehow lost that muscle as we do more research and innovation. 

To innovate better, we need to go back to our 5-year old selves!

By the end of the talk, I’d like us to have more conversations on the following: 

1. Why high innovation performance is a culture and basic skills question, not advanced tools

2. How innovation teams will deliver better results by sticking to (and getting better at) the basics

3. Which consumer research approaches best build empathy, not just intelligence

Question #2: You have a great topic. What led you to choose it?

In addition to above, as an enterprise innovation capability leader, I continue to learn about which skills, mindsets, and tools enable innovation teams to increase innovation success rate. I am hoping this topic will spark conversations among my industry peers so we can all learn something new to take back to our innovation teams.    

Question #3: We are glad to have you with us. What would you like to learn from other speakers and attendees? 

As mentioned above, I would love to hear more about the challenges, hacks and best practices across different industries and company cultures, specifically any learnings they have from their recent in-market successes and more importantly, failures.    

Question #4: Our industry is buzzing with the word innovation. What is research innovation to you?

This ties in pretty well with my talk. Simply, research innovation is first and foremost, excellence in research, and then secondly, enhancing it further to derive greater value. Excellence in research all comes back to depth of insights and impact to the business – without these, research is useless. Innovating on research is not only about adopting new tech and approaches, though they are important and their use should be significantly better than current ones.

They can also be about method evolutions and creative re-combinations that likewise deliver improved value. In a few examples I will share during my talk, I will show how my teams creatively innovated on traditional methods. And yes, there will also be examples of strategic application of tech and AI, in combination with traditional and classical tools. 

Question #5: Research technology and automation are helping to streamline our cost and time. What else is at work to help insights professionals?

Cost and time benefits are important, but depth, rigor and newness of insights are hygiene benefits that technology and automation don’t necessarily deliver as of this time. Insights professionals should think of these tools as Augmented Intelligence for now, enhancing rather than replacing their work. 

As GenAI and other similar technologies evolve, I’m excited to see how they can start bringing a level of creativity, questioning and observing that only seasoned research professionals can currently do. 

Question #6: Greenbook works to move the insights industry and profession forward into the future. What is the biggest thing you would like to see change to improve for our industry?

This is a great question. Similar to the points above, I’m observing a proliferation of tools, approaches and capabilities that make claims without robust evidence, or just exacerbates clients’ tendencies to generate more data, not necessarily rich insights. Working with clients and vendors alike, Greenbook is best placed to help point innovation researchers to solutions that will truly step-change research outcomes.  

Question #7: Speaking of the future, the IIEX conference series is a leader in leading discussion of insights future prediction. What do you see on the horizon that (hopefully) attendees can discuss at this event?

AI and tech continue to be hot discussion topics. I’d like to see more of how they are applied to unlocking new to the world insights, improving business outcomes for clients, and most crucially, what pitfalls innovation researchers need to avoid. 

Another area where I’d like to see more activity is the application of systems 1 approaches (cognitive and behavioral science) in identifying new and future jobs to be done. 

I’d also like to see more best practices for Horizon 3 initiatives. How do we research with 5+ years out consumers in mind? How do we best build a picture of possible future realities and provide actionable insights to our business partners now?