Andrea Mills is an international executive with an extensive and diverse experience in open innovation, R&D, business transformation, knowledge creation and management across organizational boundaries, seed-stage and early-stage tech scouting, corporate venture capital, and new ventures.
Prior to his role at Phillip Morris International, Mills served as Senior Special Advisor to the Leadership of NASA Cross-Industry Innovation Summit, co-creating the NASA Cross Industry Innovation Summit (CIIS), engaging with élite groups of top innovation executives from around the world, to share emerging technology insights and innovation lead practices, across industries. The Summit offered an engagement platform for global leaders and executives to share and gain access to insights on emerging technologies, organizational models and policy issues. The Summit deliberately created juxtapositions and intersections at the edges of disciplines and technology spaces, inducing industry leaders and scientists to step out of their comfort zones, challenge themselves in a blame-free context, and envision novel approaches to cross-industry innovation and multi-disciplinary collaborations.