Words by Pino Demaio

Nithya Gopu Solomon’s career journey spans some of the world’s biggest brands and most innovative healthcare environments. She tells us about ‘anti-disciplinary’ concepts, reimagined workflows in the health system and digitally rich prototyping spaces.

There are talented people with innovative ideas and wide-ranging skills. Then there’s Nithya Gopu Solomon, who takes the idea of skill sets to a new dimension. Her range of skills, training and experience are as extraordinary as they are diverse. For instance, she may have ended up being a cosmetics entrepreneur, having studied chemical engineering at Monash.

She also studied for her MBA in the USA and later ran the operations and strategic planning for a groundbreaking period of the Nike Foundation, a powerful catalyst for investment in adolescent girls’ economic empowerment.

Nithya has had roles in foreign exchange, customer advisory with Ernst & Young and as a board member of Nightingale House (a Melbourne social enterprise that supports, educates and advocates for the delivery of designer led multi-residential housing which considers at its core social health, economic resilience and environmental sustainability).

More recently, she has built a name with the Victorian Health Promotion Foundation as Executive Lead for Innovation at VicHealth for five years to 2020, curating wide-reaching programs.

She is also the founder of Banyan Solutions, which focuses on community investment, corporate responsibility and social Impact, and is currently Director of the Innovation Catalyst and Director of the Health Transformation Lab at RMIT.

The Health Transformation Lab is where health and innovation leaders from Australia and globally address questions of health system reform, transformation, technology and value through a lens of cybernetics and salutogenic design.

In their words, ‘Our anti-disciplinary lab is the home where wicked problems collide with creativity and design.’

Nithya holds a Masters of Business Administration from the Kellogg School of Management and Bachelor degrees in Engineering (Chemical) and Arts (Performing Arts) from Monash University.

It’s an eclectic mix of experiences and ideas, knowledge and know-how which has and is serving Nithya well. This accrued creativity, people skills and diverse knowledge across three continents has seen her career as an innovation executive take off.

Her outlook on her work is centred on people and their stories; finding that connection, as she says.

“The value of story and journey is always an enriching way to understand people and lives and, and interconnections,” she told Matters Journal. “And I guess this theme of finding connections and bridges has really been part of my journey ever since having migrated to Australia as a six year old and having to be immersed here but also find ways to stay connected to my heritage.

“And so the ability to traverse languages, and not just spoken languages, but the idioms that frame our world in a number of ways, is something that was just part of my life from a young age.” Her self-discipline and focus could be traced back to her days studying Indian classical dance as a child (she still performs today as a champion of southeast asian arts).

And perhaps it was this attachment, even love of, physical activity that saw her join the leadership of a global advocacy platform under the Nike banner, "Designed to Move: A Physical Activity Action Agenda".

Launched at the Clinton Global Initiative 2012 with 34 global partners, the movement grew to include 100+ organisations (corporations, government departments, non-profit organisations, academic institutions).

“To be in the for-profit sector and have a pathway into social impact was exciting,” she reflects. “To see the way that the company channelled its corporate discipline, ambition and energy towards social impact was very exciting.

“There was one focus area for the foundation: investing in adolescent girls and their economic empowerment, in the international development context’. And interestingly, thinking about data and design, in many instances we had to explicitly request for disaggregating data by gender and age, so that girls would actually be counted and and show up in the data. It wasn't always a default practice. Which is quite fascinating.

“There were many other incredible examples of seeing the value of specific business disciplines and fine-tuned consumer insights muscles applied to fields of social impact, and this solidified my wanting to keep working in this space.

“Knowing your consumer and the ability to get deep insights and actually understand stories. And people's lives, very deeply, qualitatively, to inform product design, that is an equally important lens to bring in a formalised way to the nonprofit sector.”

After returning to Australia in the mid part of the last decade, innovation and impact were top of mind for Nithya. Specifically, what innovation can bring, and opportunities to connect thought leadership across the globe into organisations like VicHealth, working right through to the community and grassroots levels.

“VicHealth was exploring a huge spectrum of ways to consider how emerging practice could get introduced to Victorian organisations,” she added.

In 2023, she’s leading the Health Transformation Lab at RMIT. It was formed around four or five years ago, anchor funded by Cisco Systems and embedded in RMIT to be the premier destination that could catalyse new ideas and ways of working across the health system.

“As we like to call it, anti-disciplinary ways of working across the health system, to really be a space in Australia where we can bring together the worlds of design, technology, enterprise and community engagement. Our work is systems-oriented in the lens that we take but very deeply person-centric in the way that we solve problems.

“At times organisations will bring their leadership teams to our premises to connect with RMIT deeply. They might hear about the latest developments from faculty, they might interface with students through curated workshops, or have bespoke provocations developed for them.

“At other times, we have developed prototypes of devices that we might test in situ to collect rich insights related to health and well-being. For example, we have a wearable device that's being trialled within aged care to look at conversation levels and whether or not that's linked to feelings of loneliness.

“We have created digitally-rich prototyping spaces, like the RMIT-Cisco Sandbox, where have numerous advanced technologies and capabilities technologies built in, to help us prototype and simulate how workflows in the health system could be radically reimagined for digitally connected worlds.

“Where falls could be detected in unexpected places or where access can be monitored, where meal trays that are left untouched for 10 minutes be detected automatically, with real time prompts for immediate attention, where robots make daily rounds to distribute supplies. So many ways in which spaces can be designed to take on much of the burden that's now placed on a very stretched workforce.

“The value of antidisciplinarity comes from distilling a bit more into processes; how do you set up for impact and what's the best way to solve problems? How can you keep yourself most open to where input, stimulus or solutions could come from."

“In Australia there's an amazing appetite for social innovation, and antidisciplinary ways of working. And particularly when housed in an institution like RMIT, or any kind of other research anchor there is this amazing ability to draw from different fields and to curate knowledge for impact.”

Nithya is one of the speakers at DiD (Data Informed Design Conference 2023), March 23-24 in Melbourne at the RMIT Capitol Theatre.

Secure your discounted tickets via https://did.placeintelligence.ai when you use the code PRO$DID23PARTNER!*