Daniella Patrick, Accenture Innovation Lab Product Manager, STEM mentor, and HBX Disruptive Strategy Participant

Daniella Patrick breaks down barriers, opens doors, creates opportunity, empowers women, and redefines the way people view themselves and the worlds in which they live. By day, Daniella is an Innovation Lab Product Manager at Accenture—an international consulting firm working at the intersection of business and technology. As the Innovation Lab Product Manager, Daniella works with a team building digital solutions to disrupt the world of human resources. When she's not in the lab, Daniella is teaching and mentoring young women in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) and challenging the conventional thinking of "what an engineer looks like". 

While waitressing tables in high school, Daniella's grandmother questioned her as to what she wanted to do—how was she going to spend her life. Daniella knew she enjoyed improving processes, finding problems and employing new ways to solve them. Her grandmother suggested engineering and Daniella embraced it wholeheartedly. She made it her mission to learn mathematics and didn't stop until she earned a masters in Mathematics from New York University, adding to her BS in Mechanical Engineering. 

Daniella grew up knowing that no idea was too big and no dream was unattainable. Her mom, a single mother, was determined to succeed as a parent and still lead a successful career. Daniella points to her mom's creativity and resolve as inspiration, "When you have a life full of barriers and struggles, it's easy to succumb to it. It's easy to say this is all I can do. But for someone like my mom, she always pushed those limitations and never accepted no for an answer."

Daniella embraces and continues to build on her mother's approach to life. As a first generation college graduate, Daniella recognizes the importance of providing opportunities to people who thought they could never achieve their goals. She deems this "disrupting the status quo" and encourages us to think about the world as not just for a certain type of people—doing so, she says, will "change the way people envision the future." 

Want to learn more about disruption and other theories from Professor Christensen? Disruptive Strategy will equip you with the tools, frameworks, and intuition to make a difference.