Paqui Lizana

Fighting Parrotism

Paqui Lizana is a global corporate innovator, visionary leader, and advocate for human-centric innovation. Trained as an aerospace engineer with an MBA, her career spans leadership roles at HP Inc., SEAT/VW Group, and currently Global Technology Strategy at IKEA. Recognized as a Future Maker by Singularity University and a featured voice at MIT’s Imagination in Action, she believes technology, humanity, and nature must evolve together to build a sustainable future.

Often embracing the role of the outsider, she has navigated transitions across industries — from automotive to retail and biotech — guided by resilience rooted in her grandmother’s legacy of creating possibility from almost nothing. At the heart of her philosophy is a simple belief: innovation starts with who, not just what. Her journey also includes being selected for a mission to Mars at the European Space Agency.

Speaker

“A world where we are not creating the future, but scaling copies of the past.”

“We have the most powerful tool for our imagination we ever created.” For the first time in history, imagination is equal to build. Yet something is happening: everything is starting to sound the same. “Every LinkedIn post sounds the same. Every strategy deck sounds the same.”

Paqui Lizana calls this “parrotism”: a world where we are not creating the future, but scaling copies of the past. Through a personal journey with her grandmother, she reconnects with something AI cannot replicate: texture, memory, struggle. “No one asked me to be brave. I just needed to be brave.”

In a world obsessed with efficiency and perfect answers, she asks a harder question: what if friction is the point? Will we use AI to scale the ordinary, or to “turn the world upside down”?

Fighting Parrotism

Paqui Lizana

Speaker

“A world where we are not creating the future, but scaling copies of the past.”

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