Maartje van Leuven

Where do you work?

I work at Vrumona (Heineken). My job title is Innovation manager. I'm working in the marketing department of the company. I have a strategic and ambiguous role; On the one hand I'm in charge of the innovation funnel, I manage the process and progress of all innovation projects. I encourage the marketeers to innovate with their brands. On the other hand I manage several bigger innovation projects with multi-disciplinary teams.

What have you learned from your study at IDE?

As I know a little from each discipline within the company, it enables me to look at a project from different viewpoints, which makes collaboration in multi-disciplinary taskforces more easy. 

With my technical knowledge I can easily estimate the consequences of marketing-decisions to the production lines, which quickly gives a view of the feasibility of a project. My creativity helps to think different and to encourage people to think of other possibilities and as an IO'er I'm trained to make things visible, which helps a lot in presentations.