Marietta (Avakyan) Avakova (Switzerland)
Product Delivery Leader for Companies & Non-Profits,
Change Management Advisor | Guest Speaker, Lecturer at Victorinox
Workshop Speaker
Ex-Novartis, Ex-Straumann
Seven years ago, Marietta stepped onto Swiss soil with nothing but a single suitcase and a resolve to reinvent her life. Driven by a thirst for purpose and a vision to learn from one of the world’s finest healthcare systems, she left behind the familiar to pursue a Master of Science in Global Healthcare at the University of Geneva. Her admission, unconventional yet earned through her pioneering work in EdTech and Digital Health startups, marked the beginning of a new chapter—one where academia met real-world innovation.
Long before Switzerland, Marietta’s story began at 17, when she entered the workforce, her hands-on ethos already burning bright. She thrived in the dynamic chaos of startups, where she learned to take risks, pivot swiftly, and build solutions from scratch. Yet it was in the structured corridors of corporate giants that she honed leadership, negotiation, and the art of steering complex digital transformations. Over eight transformative years, she bridged both worlds, launching remote monitoring apps to track patients’ vision at home, cloud-based platforms, and AI-driven medical software—tools that redefined how healthcare meets technology.
“Startups teach you to dance with uncertainty,” she reflects, “while corporates show you how to orchestrate the symphony.” Yet Marietta noticed a gap: too often, digital transformations stumbled not from lack of vision, but from siloed teams and undervalued technical expertise. This became her battleground.
Today, as a Digital Transformation Advisor and Technical Project Lead, Marietta empowers healthcare leaders to navigate this very crossroads. She equips them to save time, resources, and energy—whether streamlining digital product development for hospitals or guiding startups through go-to-market strategies. Her mantra? Collaboration fuels innovation. Beyond boardrooms, she lectures at universities, demystifying the leap from academia to industry for the next generation of health innovators.
Her credentials read like a mosaic of interdisciplinary mastery: a linguistics degree, a healthcare MSc from Geneva, an MBA from Lausanne, and a technical certification from ETH Zürich. Yet it’s her work with titans like Novartis, Dentsply Sirona, and the United Nations—and even her unexpected role as a Guest Speaker for Victorinox—that paints the full picture: a leader who turns complexity into clarity.
For Marietta, every step—from that single suitcase to advising global brands—is woven with purpose. “Life isn’t about waiting for change,” she says. “It’s about building it, one digital heartbeat at a time.”