AKIRA MORITA
Akira MORITA is an innovation consultant with 14 years of experience helping teams grow, transition into new arenas, create new services and products, and tightening their strategies and goals. His focus has always been fostering conversations and collaborations that spark change, be it an honest talk about tough transitions, an open ideation sprints, or an expansive dialogue about what could be, among those familiar with each other or strangers across cultures and disciplines.
His clients include: UNDP, USAID, CARE International, CAFOD, People In Need, Duke University, International Sustainability Institute/Loom Foundation, Group3 Architects, Snaptotes, Thundershirt, Capitol Hill Chamber of Commerce, and Green Plus.
He believes sensing—what we might say “seeing” or “listening” broadly, but is really an all-encompassing act—is a cultivated skill and an essential ability in our work. All work is relationship, and deep relationships are formed and nurtured only when people really see each other. Yet, this skill of seeing, sensing, is one to which there’s no class nor pedagogy even in our formal education. Fortunately for him, having a piano teacher as a mother taught him to pay attention to subtle differences. Living in six different countries as a foreigner during his last three decades honed this skill further. His daily mindfulness-based practices deepens it.
He combines the teaching and practice of this sensing with the tenets of design thinking—bias towards action and iteration, paying attention to the contexts and user experience, and the spirit of exploration and experimentation with an open mind, will and heart—to help his client gain the broadest perspectives, deepest insights, and brightest ideas through practice.
He has also used this practice himself to help create various community arts initiatives and festivals in Sikkim, India, Durham, NC, Seattle, WA and Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
He holds Master’s of Science in Parks, Recreation and Tourism from North Carolina State University, a school with one of the oldest agriculture, forestry, engineering and architecture programs in the US. He studied design, Latin American history and Spanish outside of his curriculum, and served as the chair and then the graduate advisor for the Student Union’s International Student Committee.
He is a founding partner of Design Kompany, LLC, and currently serves as Community Design Director at School of Slow Media, a global, transformative leadership development initiative, and co-founding consultant partner at ANAKOT Asia Academy.