Eric Grassi
Innovation consultant and founder of Digital Inova Lab
Who Eric Grassi is
Eric Grassi is an innovation consultant and the founder of Digital Inova Lab. He works with business owners going through transformation to gain clarity on priorities, structure processes, and apply artificial intelligence and automation with method. Based in Greater Sao Paulo, working remotely across Brazil.
At a glance
- Practice
- Strategy consulting, applied innovation, AI and automation
- Company
- Digital Inova Lab, which he founded
- Coverage
- Alphaville, Barueri, Santana de Parnaiba, Osasco, and remote across Brazil
- Education
- FIAP, RWTH Aachen University and EIT Digital
- Starting point
- A strategic diagnostic, at no cost
What does Eric Grassi do?
The work starts by reading the business as a system: model, operations, channels, processes, people, technology and product. What was scattered becomes a short list of priorities, in a defensible order.
Execution comes after that, not before. Processes get designed, automation is built where repetition is worth scaling, and artificial intelligence goes in where it improves a decision or removes manual work — not because it is fashionable.
The last layer is the one that decides whether results hold: capability. The company should finish the engagement able to operate, decide and evolve on its own. Consulting that creates permanent dependency treats the symptom and keeps the problem.
Who hires Eric Grassi?
The recurring profile is the owner or partner of a company that already operates and already has revenue, and has hit a ceiling that is not about demand: it is about structure. Operations grew ahead of process, every decision routes through the same person, and digital initiatives happened without any order between them.
The work assumes the decision-maker stays involved. It does not work when the expectation is to outsource the entire transformation, when the interest is learning one specific tool, or when what is wanted is a software shop executing a fixed scope.
It is also not a digital marketing agency, nor consulting that delivers a diagnostic as a PDF and leaves. What gets delivered is installed capability: process designed, automation running, and the team able to operate it.
Where does the experience come from?
Before consulting, Eric was a Digital Transformation and Innovation Specialist at Vero Internet, a telecommunications company with more than 3,200 employees across over 450 cities. There he led open innovation programmes, mapping real challenges across every area of the company and connecting them to solutions.
Earlier he worked at Vivo (Telefonica) and Grupo Big, formerly Walmart Brazil, as well as InovAtiva and Inovenow. These are very different scales: from startups in acceleration to nationwide operations. That range is where the judgement comes from about what works at each size, and what only works on a slide.
He also serves as a mentor and evaluator in innovation programmes: Rock New Ventures, run by FIAP, and Conecta Startup RS, run by Softex.
What is Eric Grassi's background?
Educated in technology and management at FIAP, with a period at RWTH Aachen University in Germany. In 2021 he completed Value Creation Through Innovation at EIT Digital, a programme focused on turning innovation into measurable economic value — which is, in practice, the question running through the whole consulting practice.
What does Eric Grassi work on?
The work sits at the intersection of seven territories. None of them holds up alone:
- Strategy consulting
- Applied innovation
- Artificial intelligence applied to business
- Process automation
- Process architecture
- Digital products
- Change management
Technology is the means. Strategy, method and the capacity to execute are the centre.
Where to follow the work
Eric publishes regularly on applied innovation, AI and management. The content is the same material that underpins the consulting work, written for people who decide.
Next step
It starts with a conversation.
A strategic diagnostic at no cost, around 60 minutes, to understand where the business stands and decide what deserves attention first.