Rapelang Rabana

'The pace of change has never been this fast, yet it will never be this slow again.' - Justin Trudeau When you are dealing with first-of-a-kind situations, you can’t rely on what you’ve done before. New market conditions, staggering numbers of underserved communities, changing customer needs, increasing resource constraints, new employee demands, and new questions … all require new approaches. Using technology to solve social and economic challenges, at scale, as been my life's work. I am been living and breathing digital technology, building products and reinventing business models from the time I finished university. Over the past 16 years, I have seen both the beauty and the limitations of technology. From my first startup Yeigo developing some of the earliest mobile VoIP applications, to Rekindle Learning, pioneering bite-sized mobile learning to empower people to learn and rapidly adapt in the workplace. At Imagine, the combination of smart technology, scalable implementations and long-term sustainable partnerships is bringing literacy and numeracy skills to millions of children. At FFWD Innovation, I reverse-engineer my 16+ years of digital innovation experience to inspire, coach and mentor teams to build and scale innovations faster. In so doing, we turn corporations into hyper-scale startups and employees with owner mindsets. Bringing practical, hands-on innovation experience from an African context to the table has allowed me to share a stage with President Paul Kagame of Rwanda, President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa and best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell, Prof Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum, amongst others. Email: hello[at]ffwdinnovation.com