Tendayi Viki

Strategyzer

Expert Business Agility Coach

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About Tendayi

Tendayi Viki is an Associate Partner at Strategyzer, where he helps large companies innovate for the future while running their core business. He previously served as Director of Product Lifecycle at Pearson, a global education company, where he co-designed and helped implement Pearson’s Product Lifecycle, an innovation framework that won Best Innovation Program 2015 at the Corporate Entrepreneur Awards in New York.

Tendayi holds a PhD in Psychology and an MBA, and he has written three books: Pirates In The Navy, The Corporate Startup, and The Lean Product Lifecycle. He is also a regular contributor at Forbes Magazine.

In addition to his work as a consultant, trainer, and speaker for several companies, including Unilever, American Express, Airbus, Tetrapak, Copenhagen Fintech, Pearson Vue, Rabobank, Standard Bank, The British Museum, The World Bank, General Electric, and Whirlpool, Tendayi has spent 12 years as an academic at the University of Kent, where he is now Honorary Senior Lecturer. He has also been a Research Fellow at Stanford University and a Research Assistant at Harvard University.

Tendayi’s specialties include corporate innovation, creativity, entrepreneurship, lean startup, customer development, business model design, organizational psychology, team building, research methods, and statistical analysis.

Languages

English
Shona

Published Articles & Case Studies

Innovation Thinking Ahead

In this keynote, Tendayi discusses how to educate young people to become more innovative. The essence of innovation is to accept failure. We need to teach young people to innovate by designing like they are right and testing like they are wrong.

Faced with the choice of starting a company or joining a large corporation, Steve Jobs believed that it was ‘more fun to be a pirate than to join the navy’. But for innovators inside established companies, making a distinction between being a pirate and joining the navy is a fallacy. We have to figure out a way to become pirates in the navy! There is nothing harder in business than trying to innovate within large corporations. Innovators in big companies often face internal opposition as well as their external competitors. It is the management of the core business that tends to get in the way of innovation.

How Innovators Can Thrive In Corporate Environments

In this keynote, Tendayi Viki addresses some of the obstacles that innovators face inside large companies; and also some of the key mistakes they make.

The Corporate Startup is a practical guide for established companies that aspire to develop and sustain their innovation capabilities. The world around us is changing rapidly. There is now more pressure on established companies to innovate. The challenge most companies face is how to develop new products for new markets, while managing their core business at the same time. The principles and practices outlined in this book provide companies with a blueprint of how to manage innovation while they execute on their core business. The Corporate Startup provides frameworks, visualizations, templates, tools and methods that can be easily applied to develop new products and business models.

Beyond Experiments

Aligning Innovation With Corporate Strategy

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