Buildings account for 39% of global carbon emissions, but Youssef Mawad, vice president and managing director of JCI Ventures, the investment arm of Johnson Controls International, wants to bring that number down.
“We are one of the very few players focused completely on buildings,” he says. “My mission is to build a team that can be a catalyst for real innovation. We want to build a fund that can back a major breakthrough.”
Johnson Controls is a global leader and multinational, with 100,000 + employees known for providing smart building solutions, heating and cooling equipment, security systems ad fire safety technology for buildings. Mawad wants to help the company innovate in new areas such as carbon capture, waste heat recovery, heat pumps and hydrogen.
In the less than two years that he has been managing director he has already streamlined JCI Ventures’ rate of investment. Mawad and the four senior directors in the team made six investments last year.
“When you’re on the board [of a startup] and see their struggles and you remember that you’ve been through the same and you start brainstorming solutions. That’s magic.”
As a former entrepreneur who cofounded a logistics healthcare and data analytics solution, Mawad is also a champion of innovative startups, trying to build bridges between two completely different and complex worlds: big corporates and small agile startups.
“One of the biggest joys of my job is the portfolio management piece,” he says. “When you’re on the board [of a startup] and see their struggles and you remember that you’ve been through the same and you start brainstorming solutions. That’s magic.”
Equally important is building internal relationships with senior management and the investment committee. “The internal network is super critical,” he says. “This was a big piece of my success because I made it [a priority] when I first joined. You need to build trust with all stakeholders, because information and intelligence is sometimes within the organisation, and this takes time. I’m still doing it and I do it every day.”
See the full list of Emerging Leaders 2023 here.
