FOUR DECADES OF TRANSFORMATION

My professional career hasn’t followed a single discipline. For over four decades, I’ve worked across business, technology, innovation, strategy, and urban development, participating in diverse transformation processes and learning from very different sectors, cultures, and realities.

I’ve experienced firsthand some of the major technological shifts of recent decades: the transformation of telecommunications, the transition from analog to digital photography, the emergence of the Digital Home, the evolution toward the Smart City, and, more recently, the impact of data and artificial intelligence on how we live and interact.Esa diversidad de experiencias terminó convirtiéndose en mi principal herramienta: conectar conocimientos que normalmente se analizan por separado y observar los problemas desde una perspectiva transversal.

NOT A CAREER,
A JOURNEY THROUGH CHANGE

When I look back, my career is not explained so much by the positions I have held as by the transformations I had the opportunity to experience. Each stage took me into different territory and added a new perspective to the previous one.

BUSINESS & LEADERSHIP

My first school was the corporate world. For years I held commercial, strategic, and management responsibilities at companies like Telefónica, Electrolux/AEG, and AGFA, working in markets undergoing significant changes.

That period taught me to understand an organization from different perspectives: strategy, people, customers, competition, partnerships, results, and decision-making. But above all, it taught me that leading during times of transformation requires more than simply managing the present well: it requires understanding where the environment is heading.

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

Digital transformation didn’t come to me as a theory. I experienced it firsthand, in sectors where technology was profoundly altering products, markets, and behaviors.

At AGFA, I participated in one of the most radical changes an industry can undergo, from a leadership position: the transition from analog to digital photography. Later, at ACCEDA, I worked on developing the concept of the Digital Home, when we were beginning to envision connected homes long before constant connectivity became part of our daily lives.

Those experiences reinforced a conviction that I would later apply to cities: technology transforms the means extraordinarily, but it doesn’t, on its own, determine the ends. The real question is always what we do with it and what it truly improves in people’s lives.

SMART CITIES

My approach to the Smart City began as a natural evolution of the Digital Home: if connectivity and intelligence could transform housing, they could also transform how buildings, services, and ultimately, the city itself function.

From ACCEDA and later through various business initiatives, associations, and working groups, I participated in those early years when we began to define what a smart city should be. I worked alongside technology companies, government agencies, architects, urban planners, and specialists from very different disciplines, promoting projects and spaces for reflection on the Digital City and the Smart City.

That period allowed me to understand both the extraordinary potential of technology applied to the city and one of its main risks: confusing the intelligence of systems with the intelligence of the city.

A city is not a sum of technological solutions. It is an extraordinarily complex system in which infrastructure, the economy, the environment, culture, education, public space, social relationships, and life projects coexist. Understanding that complexity was what, over time, began to take me beyond the Smart City itself.

Smart City was not the destination. It was part of the journey.

URBAN & INTERNATIONAL EXPERIENCE

The city ultimately led me beyond the confines of technology. My collaboration with urban planners, architects, developers, government agencies, and businesses allowed me to approach the territory from perspectives that, until then, had remained outside my direct professional experience.

I worked on and participated in initiatives related to urban transformation in Spain and Latin America, and I had the opportunity to learn about and collaborate on projects and discussions about cities in contexts as diverse as Mexico, Panama, China, Qatar, and Cameroon.

Madrid, Mexico City, Chihuahua, Beijing, Doha, and Yaoundé represent radically different urban, cultural, and economic realities. It was precisely this diversity that taught me something essential: there is no ideal city that can be replicated anywhere. Each territory has a history, a culture, aspirations, and people that must be part of any vision for the future.

This international experience broadened my understanding of urban innovation. The best solutions are not necessarily the most technologically advanced, nor are they necessarily the ones that work in the cities we usually consider benchmarks. They are those who are able to understand the place before trying to transform it.

There is no future city without understanding the place it comes from.

FROM TECHNOLOGY TO HUMANISM

Over time, all those experiences began to converge. Business, technology, digital transformation, urban planning, and diverse cultures led me to ask myself a question that was both simpler and more difficult: why do we transform a city?

The answer could no longer lie solely in efficiency, sustainability, connectivity, or innovation. All of these are necessary, but they are means to an end. The true purpose of a city lies in the people who inhabit it and in the life that city allows them to build.

From this stems my evolution from the Smart City to the Human City and the concept of the Good City: a perspective that explicitly incorporates the human dimension alongside the economic, environmental, and social dimensions, and that places technology where I believe it adds the most value: at the service of people, not as an end in itself.

Today, this evolution defines my way of working. Not from a specific discipline, but by connecting strategy, technology, territory, and human behavior to help envision which cities are worth building.

Technology taught me how cities can change. Experience taught me to ask why they should.

SELECTED EXPERIENCE

A selection of experiences, projects and environments that have contributed to building this cross-cutting perspective.