The LUMS Office of Advancement, in collaboration with the National Incubation Center (NIC) Lahore, organised an innovative industry talk on ‘The Digital Future’ with alumnus Salahuddin Khawaja, BSc 1997, on Friday, 12 April, 2019 at the NIC Auditorium at LUMS.
Currently based in New York, Khawaja is the founder of Decklaration, a design and creative agency, and has spent more than 15 years in the financial sector in New York, Hong Kong and Tokyo. With experience as a management consultant with Deloitte, and after having worked in J. P. Morgan and Bank of America in the field of Investment Banking, Khawaja never lost sight of his passion for design and story-telling, and that is how Decklaration came into existence. He brought all of this experience back home for the LUMS community at this session.
Walking the audience through the growth and evolution of first the industrial and then the digital sphere, Khawaja shared with the attendees a method for established organisations and startups to innovate their way to success; as he likes to call it, “Disrupt or be disrupted”. As he shed light on the different aspects of our digital future, from Biotechnology and Robotics to Artificial Intelligence (AI), he explained how success and innovation in the past lend themselves as examples for the future and reinforce the idea that we must venture if we want to gain. Given the advent of the digital revolution, Khawaja expressed that our ventures should also be digitally innovative in nature if we want to make the most of the rapid transformation taking place in our world. He illustrated the importance of this by sharing a proven approach that has helped organisations in the US not only remain relevant but also thrive.
The session was an interactive one as Khawaja opened the floor for questions after his talk and many more interesting discussions ensued.
