Karakoram

Winner of the United Nations Development Program's 2020 Global Innovator Award Karakoram is an Impact Venture Studio and a Design, Engineering, & Innovation consultancy specialising in Civic Technology, dedicated to solving the world's toughest humanitarian, democratic, and environmental challenges. As the Founder and Innovation Lead, I have guided the company for five years. Based in London, England, our team of strategists, designers, and engineers uses entrepreneurial thinking, strategy, design, and engineering to create new products, services, experiences, and spin-out ventures. We focus on meeting unmet needs while helping our clients embrace new mindsets, skills, and work methods, balancing purpose and profit. At Karakoram, we believe in empathy, optimism, and applying creativity as a complement to analytical reasoning. This approach enables us to work through ambiguity with confidence, and we partner closely with our clients to make a future inclusive of people, planet, and profit. We focus on de-risking developmental or humanitarian interventions and projects by injecting the same type of product/venture mentality and rapid experimental engineering used by top Silicon Valley accelerators and product shops. We have built high-impact projects across three continents, ranging from adapting Google Venture Sprints to work for developmental challenges to demonstrating how to use rapid prototyping of software, hardware, and IoT in de-risking ambitious interventions. Our efforts have been recognized by the UN Development Program, as we were awarded the 2020 Global Innovator Award. As a company, we aspire to reimagine and drive a paradigm shift for the future of private consultancy/intergovernmental humanitarian partnerships, using the current relationship between NASA and its private sector partners as a template for getting things done. We are proud of the work we have done and look forward to continuing to make a positive impact on the world.