Masters in Youth Leadership | Innovation Lead, Creative HQ | NZTE Industry Transformation | Startup Accelerator Coach | Fractional COO, Fintech | Innovation Practitioner
Megan Rorich lives and works in the space most people find overwhelming: the moment when an idea meets reality and has to become something that actually works. As Innovation Lead at Creative HQ and in her work with NZTE on industry transformation, she has coached founders and organisations through the full arc from concept to shipped product, doing the messy, human, iterative work that sits between inspiration and outcome.
Her Masters-level background in youth leadership development gives her a people-first lens that runs through all of her innovation work. She understands that the biggest obstacles to making new things stick are rarely technical: they are about culture, capability, confidence, and the willingness of people to keep moving when things get hard. As a fractional COO in a fintech startup, she is simultaneously living that reality herself.
At academyEX, she brings the practitioner's perspective to the MCOR programme: what change actually requires of the people doing it, and what it means to lead an organisation through transformation rather than just planning one.