S 02 | Ep 18 From Design Sprints to Boardrooms : Turning Human - Centered Insights into ROI Iliana Oris Valiente is Managing Director and Head of Innovation Centers for the Americas at Accenture , where she bridges the startup world , the corporate world , and the investor world with what she describes as a translator ' s mindset . She is also a chartered accountant who discovered blockchain by recognizing it as a distributed ledger system , a detail that says a lot about how she thinks . The episode begins with a frank observation that most large organizations fail at technology adoption not because of the technology itself but because no one ever asked the people who have to use it whether it actually works for them . Iliana ’ s teams spend significant time facilitating what she calls human - centered design sprints , bringing cross - functional stakeholders into alignment before a single dollar gets spent on implementation . The conversation moves into her parallel work as an angel investor , LP , and informal advisor to family offices that want exposure to venture capital but have historically lacked the language and context to get started . She makes the case that family offices are structurally well suited for early - stage investing , particularly in deep tech and science , where timelines to exit now average 11 to 12 years .