This episode’s guest is Elena Zloteanu, International Design Thinking Program Manager at Hochland. Hochland is a cheese and dairy manufacturer based in Germany, with distribution across Europe and the United States. Elena has been with Hochland for 18 years and held many positions across marketing and innovation. Today, her role focuses on implementing Design Thinking at Hochland. Her mission is to scale adoption of Design Thinking across the organization as both a toolbox and mindset, with the goal of contributing to the organization's innovation effort and speeding up the time to market of new products.. 

Years ago, Elena made it her mission to bring Design Thinking into Hochland, and make it a core element of their business. In this episode, she is going to share a lot about that journey with us. Look forward to learning: 

• Elena’s perspective on why innovation is important in the food category - and for cheese specifically for her
• How Elena learns from failures and how a past “successful failure” in design thinking helped lead her to where she is today
• How she continued innovation and design thinking efforts through COVID - creating what is called an innovation bubble. 

Sponsor info: Cast & Hue

Website: castandhue.com

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