Rick Chavez, Chief Solutions Officer, Microsoft Advertising and Consumer Monetization Business Group
Tuesday 9/30, 10:30am -11:30 am EST
Forum: Cultivating Innovation and Entrepreneurship
He is responsible for innovating solutions that enable the world’s most important brands to connect and deeply engage with the customers they serve. His team works with Global 250 enterprises to solve high-value problems, ones that blend consumer internet and enterprise assets from the broad Microsoft portfolio. In this capacity, he leads an inter-discipline organization that spans field sales, marketing, and engineering, and is comprised of a Consumer Insights team and an xD (Experience Design) team.
Rick has introduced the ‘Studio Model’: an approach for innovating insight-powered experiences that provide people more of what they want, and less of what they don’t – at work, home, and on-the-go. The insights are based on highly-differentiated frameworks for understanding human behavior, based on the primary research of the Consumer Insights team[1]. These insights are brought to life through design-based capabilities of the xD team. The Studio Model emphasizes co-creation with consumers, brands, and partners, and a test-and-learn iterative approach where are ideas are framed, vetted, and then ‘prototyped into existence.’ In this model, solutions are ‘pulled’ into the market – tuned by the evolving digital habits of consumers and the competitive demands of high-ambition CMOs.
Rick has 25+ years of experience as an entrepreneur and advisor, helping organizations build substantial market and competitive value through commercializing technology products, services and management approaches. Prior to joining Microsoft, Rick was a managing director at TCG Advisors, a boutique strategy and transformation firm based in Silicon Valley. Some of his work with companies such as Adobe was incorporated in a book on strategy and innovation, Escape Velocity, by Geoffrey Moore (Houghton Mifflin, September 2011). He also served as interim executive and start-up entrepreneur. As interim executive, he was CEO for LOBBY7 and Vice President, Corporate Development for Brix Networks. LOBBY7 was acquired by Nuance (NASDAQ: NUAN) and Brix was acquired by EXFO Corporation (NASDAQ: EXFO).[1] Key frameworks as described in the book by Natasha Hritzuk and Kelly Jones, both on Rick’s team: Multiscreen Marketing: The Seven Things You Need to Know to Reach Your Customers across TVs, Computers, Tablets, and Mobile Phones. CxO implications of these frameworks can be found in the Afterword.
