Rika is a senior leader, technologist, best-selling author, and frequent public speaker on technology-powered business transformation. She is Group Vice President within NTT’s New Ventures & Innovation team where she is building the Agile Innovation practice for emerging technologies like Edge Computing, 5G, AR/VR and IoT. She is also the co-founder of the impact venture Strides AI which powers diversity in senior leadership and has been awarded CRN’s “Women of the Channel Power 70” recognition for her achievements in supporting diversity in the tech industry.
Trilingual in Japanese, German and English, Rika grew up in Japan and moved to the US to attend Princeton University. Rika has since worked deep in the technology sector for over two decades globally, across senior executive roles in strategy, business development, consulting, and marketing with Fortune 500 companies – NVIDIA, Accenture, Capgemini Sony, NTT – and Silicon Valley startups in next-generation computing. She is a Digital Transformation veteran and has served on multiple start-up boards in Next-Generation Computing, Blockchain, and AI ecosystems.