TEAM

CEO
Jara Pascual is an author and entrepreneur centered on Innovation. She is CEO and founder of Collabwith, an online platform bringing people together and encouraging collaborations online and offline. As Board Member of the Forum Knowledge4Innovation her voice is heard regularly at the European Parliament. She is also the host of the Innovation Podcast “Business of Collaboration” and author of the Book “Innovation & Collaboration in the Digital Era” from publisher @DeGruyter (coming in fall of 2020). Jara Pascual is a Telecom Engineer from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona with an MBA from the RSM Erasmus University in Rotterdam. She is writing about innovation management for different online magazines. She has worked for 15 years in Innovation Management doing transformational innovation culture and projects in a number of Fortune 500 Companies and R&D Labs.

VP Partnerships & Business Development
Yannick Legré was the director of the EGI Foundation (www.egi.eu), for 6 years, until 31 December 2019. Formerly he was a senior research engineer at the French National Scientific Research Centre – Grid and Cloud Institute (CNRS-IdGC). He holds a Master of Science in Information Technology (MScIT) and a degree in Law (LL.B). He is a certified expert and auditor (ISO19011) in IT Service Management (FitSM – www.fitsm.eu) and Information Security (ISO27000). As Board Member of the Forum Knowledge4Innovation his voice is heard regularly at the European Parliament. Over the last 20 years, Yannick Legré has been involved in more than 50 projects in the areas of e-Infrastructures, healthcare and biomedical research, as well as biodiversity and environmental research. He has successfully coordinated several EC, NATO and nationally funded projects. Last, but not least, Yannick has also been the co-founder and president of the international HealthGrid association, and held different high-level positions in a number of SMEs.

Executive Partner
Over the last decade, Francesc has been focusing on transforming businesses and governments with advanced technology solutions. As International Business Advisor, Francesc is supporting Collabwith with high-touch relationship building and helping to identify customer needs and turning them into real by advising key senior stakeholders on how to digitally transform their business.

Director UX
Virginia Vila Palacín is a BSc in Digital Interaction Design at University of Dundee. Her working background has been focused mainly on mobile technology. She has been involved in a wide range of projects that not only have included UX but also Service Design, Data Visualisation and Innovation. She is driven by a need to understand how technology can help people and in doing so, shaping products and services with the guidance of Design Thinking. Currently, she is living in Zaragoza, Spain.

Advisory Board Member
Robbert Fisher is specialized in EU strategy and policy. For more than 30 years Robbert has been involved in EU policy, as a seconded expert, as an analyst and as an external programme, project and policy evaluator and reviewer. He is currently associated investigator at the University de las Campinas in Sao Paolo where he is working on AI and Big Data for policy, president of Knowledge4Innovation and expert contributor to Innovators magazine. Previously was managing director of the Joint Institute for Innovation Policy (joint venture of TNO, VTT, Tecnalia and Joaneum Research) and end responsible for a wide variety of policy related studies and projects, most of which focus on supporting the European Commission in providing evidence to support defining its policies and activities through evaluation, impact assessment, monitoring, specific analyses (economic, social) and foresight. Robbert managed over 60 contracts for the EC, and was responsible for several studies such as the analysis of Mission Oriented Policies, the re-industrialisation of the Solar PV industry in the EU, analysis of the IoT field in the EU, and a study defining the approach towards a single and innovation European Transport system. He has been rapporteur of the CIP ICT PSP interim evaluation panel and project director of the CIP-ICT-PSP evaluation support team, leader of two evaluation contracts for the Eco Innovation Programme, and senior advisor to the Service Innovation Panel. Robbert was also leading the Major Innovations study, RO-cKETs (Roadmap for cross-cutting KETs activities in Horizon 2020). In recent years he wasleading a study on eGovernment Visions 2020 (with RAND), was director of the ERASCOPE study (analysing the effects of scale and scope of research programmes in ERA) and the Innovation Impact study, which analysed the innovation outputs of the 5th and 6th Framework Programmes. Prior to joining JIIP, Robbert has worked for consulting firms, including 12 years for PwC. Robbert was a seconded expert to European Commission for 5 years (DGCONECT). Robbert has a master’s degree in law of Leiden University, specializing in intellectual property law, law and informatics and business economics. He has certificates in AI and blockchain for the University of Oxford Said Business School, and executive certificates from Darden Business School, is alumnus of the PwC international management development program, and holds degrees in marketing and public relations.

Advisory Board Member
Ricardo Baeza-Yates is, since June 2016, CTO of NTENT, a semantic search technology company based in California, USA. He is also the Director of Data Science Programs at Northeastern University, Silicon Valley campus, since August 2017. He is also part-time professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona and Universidad de Chile in Santiago. Before, he was VP of Research at Yahoo Labs, based in Barcelona, Spain, and later in Sunnyvale, California, from January 2006 to February 2016. Until 2004 he was the founding director of the Center for Web Research at the University of Chile. He is co-author of the best-seller Modern Information Retrieval textbook published by Addison- Wesley in 1999 and 2011 (2nd ed), that won the ASIST 2012 Book of the Year award. From 2002 to 2004 he was elected to the Board of Governors of the IEEE Computer Society and between 2012 and 2016 was elected for the ACM Council. Since 2010 is a founding member of the Chilean Academy of Engineering. In 2009 he was named ACM Fellow and in 2011 IEEE Fellow, among other awards and distinctions. He obtained a Ph.D. in CS from the University of Waterloo, Canada, in 1989, and his areas of expertise are web search and data mining, information retrieval, data science and algorithms in general.

Advisory Board Member
Crystal Jiang, Ph.D.  26 years of business and university experience. Associate Professor of Management, Bryant University. Executive Board Member of the Academy of International Business Northeast Chapter, Associate Editor of the New England Journal of Entrepreneurship, and Caucus Committee Chair for the Academy of Management  Annual Conference in 2018. Crystal is Lego® Series Play® (LSP) facilitator with certificate in facilitating and designing LSP workshops for business, organizational, team and personal development. Crystal’s research has published in premier journals such as the Journal of Management, Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of World Business, among others. She is a frequent speaker at the Academy of Management and the Academy of International Business Annual Conference. Dr. Jiang’s research has won Best Paper Award at the Academy of Management and the Academy of International Business annual conference. Her innovation research won finalist for Innovation Management Best Paper Award in 2014.She has been interviewed by Wall Street Journal, Associated Press, National Public Radio on the evolution of Chinese companies and the Automobile Industry.