Ernesto Noboa Vallarino is the poet rector of innovation

Unbridled hope, full of the desire to achieve what is desired, would very well deserve to be called “Esperanza.” And you can have your own verses:

Tired of listening to me, next to my hope, silence buried my voice, where to speak is to be silent the other way around, to be human is to desire to discover, to listen: to meditate on the sound, and to doubt is a precipice …

Hope (2019) is the most recent book by Ernesto Noboa Vallarino, 55-year-old innovation expert, teacher, and poet, who recently assumed the role of rector of the Casa Grande University endorsed by his degrees: Ph. D. in Business Administration (University of Navarra, Spain), Master in Business Administration (MBA, from MIT Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts, USA) and mechanical engineer (University of Dayton , Ohio, USA).

Yet despite all those titles and labels, Ernesto simply calls himself a holistic entrepreneur, that is to say, in various settings, whose maximum project is the family that he has built for 30 years with his wife, Mónica Baquerizo, and their seven children.

Being an entrepreneur involves a constant search that, in the case of Noboa, has led him through a diversity of paths dotted with satisfactions and also setbacks, but which have allowed him to clearly establish his priorities. “I have five purposes in life: write alternative books that inconvenience (texts outside the mainstream), inspire entrepreneurs to lead them to their high performance, stand unconditionally for the team of my life (their family and close collaborators), place strong wings on each of my children to that they fly high and be generous in conjugal love ”. All of your efforts are firmly aimed at meeting those goals, which keep you focused.

The human being in poetry

After graduating from university, he worked for 10 years in managerial positions at Jabonería Nacional, a company founded by his family in 1911 and sold in 2000. And since then he has dedicated himself to taking advantage of that experience in the areas of business consulting, education (he worked from 2005 to 2019 as a professor at the IDE Business School) and the arts.

Music illuminated his life from a very young age, although it was not until the age of 30 that he decided to study drums for four years at the Prelude Academy. However, literature was the art that finally caught him in 2002, while he was studying his doctorate in Spain.

Nostalgia for being uprooted abroad motivated him to write his first poem, which he published a decade later in his first book, Three whiskeys to binge (2012), text that sought to share “three flavors” of human stories. They followed The storm of the deranged (2013), in which he experiments with language through spellings, spelling juggling, and made-up words; Restrictions (2014), which uses words with the 5 vowels to describe human pathologies; qIp y q/b (2015), which maintains the idiomatic experiments; Women’s quarters (2016), whose narrative voice is female; The last child (2018), born of his childhood experiences, and Hope (2019). And next year he plans to launch his eighth text.

“I am very interested in the condition of being a human … Each poem is open to interpretation and each reader receives it in a different way.” All are signed with the pseudonym Jota Kintana, since one of his ancestors, the famous poet Ernesto Noboa y Caamaño, had the same name.

Medium terms

We have long believed ourselves to be the haunting of the day, too long. How much soul will it take, to fill my detachment? Because the opposite of the soul is not the curse, but that fear that makes us despair.

This is how he speaks with his poetry, which is one of the great endeavors of his life. For all of them, he maintains a strategy that sounds like good advice for others to turn on renewed lights in this new year. “It is scientifically proven that we overestimate what we can achieve in the short term and underestimate what we can achieve in the medium term. I base many of my personal decisions on that concept. Thus, I said that we see 2022 as the beginning of medium-term projects, for example, three years, so that they provide us with a transforming light ”.

He adds: “Let’s think about how we want to see each other on January 1, 2025. And let’s see each other in an ambitious way … The important thing is that you don’t look small, don’t look the same, don’t look at yourself with fear. You must look great in your achievements ”. That is innovation, he emphasizes.

The search for the legacy

Noboa clarifies that his life is not perfect, therefore he seeks to address problems as opportunities with diversity of possibilities. “We can avoid them, bypass them, pulverize them, make them irrelevant.” Thanks to this, he was able to get investors to ensure a long life for LabNex (Successful Business Laboratory), digital platform that he co-developed with partners to form a community of entrepreneurs focused on innovation.

The Rector’s Office of the Casa Grande University is another great undertaking of this 2022. “This is not an administrative job. It is an extraordinary undertaking in a sector that is in my blood: education ”. For this, he says he has found a fantastic team in that institution, also committed to innovation, and with whom he hopes to continue building something that should be essential for everyone, and that can be renewed and strengthened at the beginning of each year.

“No matter how young you are, the word legacy must be in your lexicon. So we can work with a focus on those aspects that we are passionate about ”. That way we will find that light of the waiting that enlightens our soul. (I)