Iliana Oris Valiente is the Managing Director and Head of Innovation Centers for the Americas at Accenture. A CPA, investor, and board member, she leads teams driving innovation in AI and emerging technologies while advising executives and boards on strategic transformation. Iliana previously founded Deloitte’s first blockchain practice, helping major organizations explore the Web3 landscape.
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1. From Ledgers to People: Making Innovation Work for Humans
Iliana begins by sharing her personal story. Early in her career, she often felt like she didn’t quite fit the standard mold. She asked a lot of questions and challenged existing ways of thinking, which wasn’t always comfortable for those around her. Still, her curiosity was encouraged by a few key mentors, and that curiosity became a constant driver in her work.
She explains how she first became interested in blockchain while working at Deloitte, long before it was widely understood. Rather than seeing it as something mysterious or overly technical, she recognized it as a type of ledger. As an accountant, ledgers were already familiar to her. That connection helped her make sense of the technology and see how it could be applied in real business contexts. This ability to connect ideas from different disciplines has shaped her career, placing her at the crossroads of emerging technology, social change, and investment decisions.
Alex then asks how she makes complex ideas understandable for people who don’t have a technical background. Iliana describes her focus on human-centered design. In her view, every system, process, or product eventually affects a person, whether that person is a customer or an employee. Ignoring that human element is one of the main reasons innovation efforts fail.
She shares a common pattern she sees in large companies: organizations invest enormous budgets into new technology but overlook how people will actually use it. When she asks leaders about employee feedback, testing during development, or plans to help teams adapt to change, there is often no clear answer. Frontline employees, the ones expected to use the tools every day, are rarely consulted.
The conversation also explores why this keeps happening. Large organizations tend to become inward-focused, shaped by internal structures, incentives, and roles. Technology teams concentrate on technical delivery, while business teams focus on targets and reporting. As a result, no one feels fully responsible for the lived experience of the end user.
Iliana stresses that technology adoption is not just a technical problem. Without listening, testing, and adjusting based on real feedback, even the most advanced systems struggle. She connects this back to her broader mission of helping shape a future that people genuinely want to live and work in. For her, leaders have real influence over that future, but only if they act with intention and keep people at the center of their decisions.
Just because things are a particular way today, does that mean they’ll be the same tomorrow? Or next month, or next year? And the answer is inevitably no—there are no guarantees. (Iliana Oris Valiente)
2. Why Big Organizations Struggle with Customer Experience and How to Fix It
Iliana explains that most companies don’t naturally operate in a human-focused way. It’s not how they were built, measured, or rewarded. Because of this, her teams are often invited in to act as connectors between different groups that don’t always speak the same language—technology leaders, business leaders, and executives. A big part of her role is helping them align around basic but essential questions: What are we trying to achieve? What does success look like? And are we truly listening to one another?
She describes this work with humor, comparing it to corporate therapy. Much of the progress comes from creating a safe space where leaders can slow down, be honest about what’s not working, and address internal tensions that usually stay unspoken. This alignment, she says, is where real breakthroughs begin.
The conversation then turns to design thinking and why it works so well. Iliana shares examples of long design sprints that combine user research, market insights, and broader technology and social trends. Instead of handing leaders a finished answer, her teams bring them into the process through workshops and working sessions. The result is often surprising: executives feel they make more progress in a few weeks than they would have in a year of traditional planning.
Alex connects this to customer centricity. As consumers, we all know what good experiences feel like. We expect clarity, speed, and transparency from companies like Amazon. Yet inside enterprises, those same standards often disappear. Alex asks why organizations struggle to apply what they already know as consumers to their own products, services, and employee experiences.
Iliana points out the strange split we live with: our personal experiences are often smooth and well designed, while our experiences as employees or customers of large institutions can be slow, confusing, and frustrating. She gives a simple example—tracking an Uber in real time versus having no idea when a passport renewal will arrive. That gap no longer makes sense to people, and expectations are rising everywhere.
Because of this, many organizations are now trying to rethink experiences across the board, not just for customers but also for employees. The goal is to close that gap and meet the standards people already experience in their daily lives.
The episode closes with a discussion about bridging worlds. Alex asks whether Iliana is unusual in moving between startups, large enterprises, and investors. Iliana describes herself as a translator—someone who helps different groups understand each other’s priorities, language, and pace. That ability to translate, she suggests, is increasingly important as organizations try to combine the agility of startups with the scale of large enterprises.
We have one set of experiences as consumers in our personal lives and a completely different set of experiences as employees or as people interacting with organizations. (Iliana Oris Valiente)
3. Translating Innovation: Helping Startups, Corporates, and Investors Actually Work Together
Iliana explains that startups and big companies live in overlapping worlds, but they move at very different speeds. Startups experiment quickly and spot new ideas early. Large enterprises move more slowly, often because of regulation, scale, and internal processes. Her role is to spot promising ideas on the edges—often coming from startups—and bring them to senior leaders at large companies in a way that makes sense and feels safe.
She describes acting as a “translator” to prevent common problems, like corporations unintentionally overwhelming startups with long pilots, unpaid work, or months of legal processes. These situations can be damaging for young companies that don’t have the time or money to wait. Sometimes her job is to broker the right introductions; other times, it’s to be honest and say, “This partnership may not be worth the risk for you.”
Iliana shares examples from her work with global startup ecosystems, including AI-focused programs looking at science, healthcare, robotics, and materials research. She takes insights from these environments and connects them with large corporates that can help scale real-world applications. She also helps investors understand where innovation is heading and how it fits into their portfolios.
Alex asks whether big, regulated companies can truly innovate at startup speed. Iliana is realistic: regulations aren’t going away, and they shouldn’t. But even within those limits, leaders can change how they think about product development, partnerships, and timelines. Sometimes the biggest shift is simply helping executives see new possibilities earlier.
The conversation also covers Iliana’s role as an investor. She works as an angel investor, venture capitalist, limited partner, and advisor, often connecting startups with corporate partners who can help them grow. More recently, she’s been helping next-generation family offices understand venture capital. Many of them turn to her because traditional advisors struggle to explain modern technology and investment models in clear, simple language.
You’re not going to change the regulatory process—it exists for a reason. But at a minimum, you can introduce a concept to a senior C-suite executive that changes how they think about new product development. (Iliana Oris Valiente)
4. Patient Capital and Big Responsibility: Who Funds the Future When Others Won’t
Iliana explains how she became an informal guide for family offices that want to invest in new technologies but don’t fully understand them. Many of these investors tell her the same thing: their traditional advisors are not deeply familiar with modern tech, venture investing, or emerging fields like AI and deep science. Because Iliana works closely with startups, corporates, and investors, she helps explain these complex topics in clear, practical terms. She sees this as a positive responsibility, especially for people with capital who can influence what kind of future gets built.
She points out that in regions like Canada and much of Europe, a large share of family office capital is not invested in venture or early-stage companies. For many families, this type of investing feels unfamiliar and risky. But Iliana argues that avoiding it has real consequences. Early-stage startups are the foundation of future employers and industries. If people with capital don’t support them, those companies struggle to grow—and entire regions risk falling behind economically.
Alex builds on this by comparing family offices to traditional venture capital. Many institutional investors operate under pressure to show results quickly, which makes it harder for them to back ideas that take a long time to mature. Deep tech and deep science often need years of research before reaching the market, and that doesn’t always fit standard VC timelines.
Iliana agrees and explains why family offices are often a better fit for this kind of innovation. They don’t face quarterly reporting pressure, they can take a long-term view, and they often invest based on values and long-range goals, not just short-term performance. With companies now taking over a decade on average to go public, this kind of patient capital is increasingly important.
The conversation then turns to venture capital itself. Alex asks where VCs fit in today and where they sometimes fall short. Iliana shares insights from a research report she co-authored, which shows that more than half of recent VC funding has gone into AI-driven companies. At the same time, many other critical areas—like infrastructure and foundational technologies—are being underfunded. Capital is also becoming concentrated in large funds writing very large checks, leaving less support for smaller, emerging managers and less fashionable sectors.
Family offices don’t have quarterly reporting requirements. They have the flexibility to invest in areas they’re passionate about and that align with their investment thesis. They also have patient capital—and patient capital is exactly what’s needed in domains like deep science. (Iliana Oris Valiente)
5. Looking Where Others Aren’t: Finding Value Beyond the Hype
Iliana explains that today, a large share of investment capital is flowing into a very narrow slice of the market. Money piles into the same sectors, the same geographies, and the same types of funds, which creates intense competition and limits upside. From her perspective as an investor, that’s usually a signal to look elsewhere. Real opportunity often exists where there is strong need, less attention, and fewer investors competing for the same deals.
She describes the thinking behind a research project she worked on called The Alpha Report. Its goal is to help investors identify underfunded but high-potential areas—both by sector and by geography. She gives a clear example: fintech in the United States is crowded and heavily funded, while fintech in Latin America has far fewer investors but enormous room to grow. The same amount of capital can have a much bigger impact in markets like that.
Iliana also shares her interest in backing smaller, specialist venture funds rather than large, long-established ones. These newer fund managers often have deep experience in a specific area and a clear point of view shaped by their own careers, not by trends. She explains that research shows smaller funds frequently deliver stronger returns, partly because it’s much harder to generate strong results at massive scale.
Alex connects this to Iliana’s work with large enterprises, where she helps industries that don’t always look exciting from a venture perspective—but are essential to the economy and full of unmet needs. These sectors may not attract waves of startups, but when the right founders do show up, there can be real demand and long-term value.
Iliana agrees and adds that she often helps B2B startups understand how to work with large organizations, especially when selling into complex, regulated environments. She reflects on feedback she once received: that her strength is being able to shift roles depending on the room—bringing structure and experience to smaller organizations, or fresh thinking to more established ones.
You can be the adult in the room for a smaller-scale organization, or the young, disruptive innovator in the room, depending on the context. (Iliana Oris Valiente)
6. Staying Playful While Building the Future: Practical Advice for Corporates and Founders
Alex frames Iliana as a “playful adult,” someone who takes serious responsibility for the future while still staying open to ideas, experimentation, and learning. From there, he asks for concrete advice for two groups: large enterprises and startup founders who want to work with them.
Iliana’s guidance for corporates is clear. She believes innovation should be treated as a core function, just like marketing or technology. Many companies invest heavily in innovation but don’t track it properly or understand the return they’re getting. Her advice is to build innovation as an ongoing capability, not as a one-off initiative. In the age of AI, this means developing an internal engine for experimentation, learning, and reinvention that strengthens over time.
For founders and scale-up leaders, her message is encouragement paired with realism. She urges them to keep going, stay close to the needs of their stakeholders, and remain aware of where the world is heading. AI, she notes, is not just another tool to add at the end of a process—it changes how people interact with systems and with each other. That shift matters whether you’re a small startup or a global enterprise.
The conversation ends on a lighter note, with a playful exchange about AI avatars, digital twins, and humanoid robots. Iliana jokes about her AI twin already representing her at conferences, while Alex wonders whether future interviews might include both the human and the machine.
For corporates, I’d say this: think about innovation as a function. You have marketing as a function. You have technology as a function. But most organizations don’t treat innovation in the same way. (Iliana Oris Valiente)
Check the episode's Transcript (AI-generated) HERE.