The Leaders Column

The CEO of VIP-Systems on turning a childhood shaped by scarcity into a career spent proving that technology only matters when it serves people

Regiane Relva Romano was nine years old when she started working, making handicrafts and selling them at the market to pay for her own English lessons. She was also teaching illiterate adults in her community to help support her family. By fourteen, she had talked her way into a job at a video rental store in Brazil, one of the few places in the country that owned a microcomputer at the time. That machine changed the direction of her life.

Today, Romano is a professor, Doctor, and CEO of VIP-Systems Tecnologia e Inovação, the founder of Latin America’s first smart store, and the mind behind Smart Campus Facens, a project that has collected innovation awards across three continents. Her story is less about a single breakthrough and more about refusing, again and again, to accept the limits she was handed. style=”color:#0d6efd;”

A Career Built Job by Job, Degree by Degree

At the video rental store, Romano was mentored by a friend who taught her the first principles of systems development, a friendship that continues to this day. That early exposure to technology set her on a path few people around her had access to. She started college at sixteen, working two jobs to pay for it, one of the only women in her class and the

youngest student on campus. She graduated at nineteen as the top student in her cohort and was invited to join the faculty the following year, just after turning twenty.

Within three years, she was managing the same professors who had once taught her, still the only woman on a faculty largely built around mainframe computing and deeply skeptical of the microcomputers she believed in.

“I always asserted my equality based on knowledge rather than gender,” she says of that period, one of many in her career where she was underestimated before she was taken seriously.

Her undergraduate capstone project, an access control system for residential complexes using barcodes and magnetic stripes, became the seed that would eventually grow into VIP-Systems.

The Idea Behind the Name

VIP-Systems was born from a single conversation. Early in her career, a director told Romano she needed to build a system for VIPs. She did not know what that meant. When he explained it meant treating people as though they could not afford to wait, as though they deserved to be surprised by quality, she made a decision on the spot.

“When I have my own company, it will be called VIP-Systems,” she told him. “I want all my clients to be VIPs.”

She began developing the idea in 1988 and officially founded the company in 1993. Several of VIP-Systems’ original clients are still with the company today.

Building the First Smart Store in Latin America

After completing six postgraduate programs alongside a master’s degree and a PhD with distinction from FGV, Romano developed what would become her most globally recognized project, the first Smart Store in Latin America, built around the Billabong store at Shopping Iguatemi Alphaville.

Back in 2011, years before these ideas became industry standard, she implemented RFID tags for stock management and loss prevention, a gamified customer experience using augmented reality and QR codes, and an interactive fitting room that recognized the item a customer was holding, displayed matching products on a touchscreen, and instantly alerted a sales associate, all before WhatsApp existed.

“I often heard that what I was developing was interesting, but that no one actually needed it,” she recalls. “Looking back, I’m so glad I didn’t give up.”

The project earned her recognition as the world’s most innovative person in retail, and its influence is still visible in major retail stores around the world today. To bring the same technology to small and medium-sized retailers, she later built a mobile smart store inside a trailer that traveled across Brazil, bridging her doctoral research with real businesses that could never have accessed it otherwise.

From One Store to an Entire Smart City

The success of the smart store led to an invitation that would define the next phase of her career, building a smart city from scratch within the Facens university campus. Smart Campus Facens transformed a 100,000 square meter area into a human-centered, sustainable mini city, connecting academia, local and federal government, startups, and established businesses.

Over the past decade, the initiative has produced more than 350 tested projects and become an internationally recognized benchmark, earning honors that include the Best IoT Technology Development Award in Berlin and the Smart City UK Award in London.

To extend the impact beyond the campus itself, Romano created and now coordinates an MBA program in Smart City Management and Innovation, which has graduated ten cohorts made up of mayors, city councilors, legislators, engineers, architects, and business leaders. She built in international exposure as well, giving students the chance to attend global benchmarks like Smart City Expo in Barcelona and Gitex in Dubai.

Her work eventually reached Brazil’s federal government, where she joined the technical team at the Ministry of Science and Technology alongside former astronaut Marcos Pontes, contributing to the National IoT Plan and the Brazilian Smart Cities Charter, and analyzing pharmaceutical research during the COVID-19 pandemic.

What Shaped Her as a Leader

Romano’s rise was not without cost. During her second year of college, she lost her mother to an aggressive cancer at just thirty-eight. At seventeen, Romano took on responsibility for her grandparents and younger sister while finishing her degree the following year, the same project that brought VIP-Systems its first clients.

She is candid about the resistance she faced simply for being a woman in a male-dominated field, and about what she learned from constantly having to prove herself.

“I often tell my students and staff that they already have the no,” she says. “They need to turn that no into a yes if they truly believe they are on the right path.”

Her leadership today is guided by ethics, integrity, collaboration, and inclusion, principles she extends into her own family as much as her company.

“There are no shortcuts in life,” she says. “We must be ethical, humble, and empathetic, and always strive for the common good.”

Advice for the Next Generation

Romano’s advice to aspiring leaders centers on purpose over technology for its own sake.

“Technology alone is not enough,” she says. “It must be aligned with values that improve society. Build networks, embrace lifelong learning, and never lose sight of the human impact of your work.”

She often returns to two quotes that have guided her own path, Tom Fitzgerald’s belief that if you can dream it, you can do it, and Walt Disney’s reminder that dreams can come true for those with the courage to pursue them.

What She Is Building Now

Romano continues teaching at six universities, coordinating her MBA program, and serving as Director of Research and Development at VIP-Systems, alongside seats on multiple boards focused on governance, innovation, and artificial intelligence.

Her current focus is expanding sandbox initiatives that help Brazilian municipalities adopt innovation friendly legislation, while growing international collaborations that scale sustainable urban solutions. She has also taken on a more personal mission recently, helping startups and small entrepreneurs find their own path to growth.

“Technology is merely a means, not an end in itself,” she says. “It cannot be developed without the clear objective of improving lives and enabling the inclusion of the less fortunate.”

Recognition Along the Way

Romano’s work has been honored consistently across two decades, including the GS1 Retail Innovative Award, recognition as the most innovative person in retail by ID World, the Globant Women That Build Award, and being named Ambassador for Digital Transformation in Brazil. Smart Campus Facens alone has earned honors from Berlin to London to Mexico City, with her most recent recognitions including finalist honors at SXSW 2025 and the Digital Transformation Awards 2025.

The Leaders Column Perspective

What makes Regiane Relva Romano’s story remarkable is not any single award or invention, it is the consistency of a single belief carried across four decades: that technology is only worth building if it makes life better for the people who were never supposed to have access to it in the first place. She built that belief as a nine year old selling handicrafts to pay for English lessons, and she has never set it down since.

From a smart store that reshaped global retail to a smart city built from bare ground, her career reads like a series of proofs that ambition and empathy are not opposites. For a field that often celebrates disruption for its own sake, Romano’s work is a reminder that the most lasting innovation tends to start with a simple question: who does this actually help?

Learn more about VIP-Systems at vip-systems.com.br or regianeromano.com.br, and connect with Prof. Dr. Regiane Relva Romano on LinkedIn or Instagram.