The first thing she built was a house for the cat.
JoAnn, age nine, showed up at the back door with some wood and a saw. Her mom — who said yes to most of her crazy ideas — looked at her and said, "Just bring your brother." Spot was an outdoor cat who lived in the woods, and nobody believed she’d use it. Spot didn’t like to come inside, but JoAnn figured she still needed shelter, warmth, and safety. JoAnn kept it small, carpeted the inside, and set it under the warm air of the dryer vent on the patio. Spot moved in immediately.
Then she walked onto the field.
Her freshman year of high school, her older brother was already playing varsity football, and she spent every game in the stands — skinny, freezing, clutching a hot chocolate. At an away game she noticed the other team's mascot. It looked warm. It looked like it was having a good time. So she went home, built a mascot costume for her own school, and at the next game walked onto the field with the band and the cheerleaders. It took a while for the football coach and the cheer coach to compare notes and realize neither of them had asked for a mascot. Her brother settled it: "Yeah, that's my sister."
The premise said spectators sit in the stands. She found another path — and kept walking it for a decade, through high school, college, and semi-pro. That path led to a mascot cooling system she designed at Villanova, and to the mascot company she built at 22, which counted the Seattle Seahawks as a customer.
Find a different angle on the goal: one that questions the premise you were handed and creates more value as a result.
Then she kept building.
At PWI Energy in Philadelphia she led the team that built E2MS, a SaaS platform in the earliest days of the model. She grew it into the system that managed the global energy and sustainability programs of Pfizer, Dell, Lockheed Martin, Xerox and others. Johnson Controls acquired it in 2008. She founded KnowE and built a values-based investing platform years before ESG had its moment. As chief innovation officer at Aircuity, she rebuilt the company's entire offering into a smart-building platform. Different industries, same move each time: find the angle the system wasn't seeing yet, and build there.
At Microsoft, she went bigger.
In 2019, JoAnn joined Microsoft to lead the Datacenter of the Future program. Everyone else was asking how to build data centers cheaper and faster. She asked a different question: what would it take for communities to welcome a data center? It was the dryer vent again, at the scale of a town. By changing the premise, her team arrived at a design where the data center, the community, and nature all come out ahead. They took that question from a blank sheet of paper to a first-of-kind regenerative design, tripled funding year over year, and Microsoft's finance team valued its impact at more than $1 billion.
Then three minutes changed the plan.
A diagnosis of invasive breast cancer — and a first round of chemo that went wrong — made one thing clear: she couldn’t go back to Microsoft. Onward. With Dean Carignan she published The Insider's Guide to Innovation at Microsoft (Post Hill Press, 2025). With six people she'd built with for decades, she co-founded Regenerous Labs. The whole story is here.
Now.
Today she writes and hosts Innovating Out Loud, speaks to leaders about regeneration and the people, behavior, and practices of innovation, and builds at the Lab. In 2025 she was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. A lot has changed, but not her guiding principle since the cat house under the dryer vent: are we applying our creativity to the premise, or only to the solutions within it?