As an award-winning innovation leader and first Chief Design Officer of two multinational corporations – one in food & beverage (PepsiCo) and one in science and technology (3M) – Mauro Porcini has been working for the past 25 years to design and build human-centered and design-driven cultures of innovation, creating from scratch entire capabilities, made of hundreds of creative talents, spread in every region of the world.

With his teams he is responsible for leading a new approach to innovation that generates new products and impacts existing brands, across every touchpoint, from physical to virtual – packaging, experience, events, fashion and art collaborations, retail activations, architecture, and digital media – completely transforming the user journey across all channels. But human-centered innovation is not just about the people we all design for. It’s also about the people driving the innovation process. Putting people first requires what Porcini calls unicorns: “people who are in love with people” and who have a genuine fire in them to create meaningful solutions for actual human beings. Some have qualities you might expect—the ability to dream and execute —but when was the last time you heard an executive ask prospective hires if they were kind, optimistic or humble? What are, in detail, their super-powers? How does he find these talents, hire them, grow them and retain them? And how does he tackle the massive responsibility of building new culture and new capabilities in highly complex organizations? How does he leverage design thinking as a strategic framework to guide innovation across the entire organization? How does he create a shared human-centered mindset to drive new business and fuel organizational growth?