About Dennis Maorwe

I'm Dennis Maorwe - an innovator focused on using technology to solve complex social challenges. 

I spent nearly seven years at Oracle (2012–2018), leading and supporting enterprise software transformations across global markets. Since then, I’ve shifted my focus to startup life and consulting when time allows. I enjoy R&D and developing unique Intellectual Property (IP). At the moment, I'm researching how technologies like Generative AI Models can improve health literacy among vulnerable populations, contributing to global health equity.

I hold an undergraduate degree in Telecommunications and Information Engineering from Kenyatta University, and a postgraduate degree in Telecommunications Business from the University of Derby, complemented by professional training from various local and international institutions.

Outside of work, I’m usually spending time with family, reading, listening to music, working out, or just exploring new ways to stay curious and grounded. I’m also the creator of the LIVEDROOTS Journal, a guided, physical journal designed to support self-exploration, creativity, and connection. It's a deeply personal project, soon available in bookstores across Kenya and East Africa, built for anyone ready to embark on a transformative inner journey.

I’m based in Nairobi, Kenya.

My guiding philosophy

At Oracle, my work took me from Africa to Europe and beyond, exposing me to worlds far larger than the one I had grown up imagining. Immersed in different cultures, I developed a forward-looking, cosmopolitan outlook, but over time, the work itself began to feel like a Sisyphean loop, effort without escape. I felt an increasing urgency to engage with life in a way that reflected who I was becoming, not who I had been.

I had read Antifragile by Nassim Taleb a few years earlier and often returned to it in moments of restlessness. At the time, I don’t think I fully grasped what antifragility demanded. In hindsight, its implication became hard to ignore: growth did not lie in optimizing within a stable system, but in stepping outside it altogether. Leaving the corporate world in pursuit of a broader, more liberal education began to feel less like a risk and more like a necessity.

I came to realize that the years of traveling, globally and mostly across Africa, had quietly prepared me to understand the role technology would come to play on the continent. I had seen how ideas, tools, and networks could shift culture faster and how a growing generation of innovators was reshaping what was possible. I wanted to be directly involved in that movement, working alongside other change-makers committed to building a more just and functional world.

During this period, I read The Challenge for Africa by Wangari Maathai, and its call to action stayed with me. Her invocation of the hummingbird ,doing what one can, with what one has, offered both humility and resolve. I understood then that meaningful impact does not come from solitary effort, but from organized systems that harness collective intelligence. My responsibility was not to replicate others’ work, but to contribute through my own lens. For me, that lens was technology, not as an end in itself, but as a vehicle for durable, people-centered social change.

Writing

This website is a nebulous, sprawling, ongoing life project. The blog is a curation of various inspirations, readings, lessons, contemplations and experiences. It is an active exploration of thoughts and experiments relating to past and present inspirations and work/life projects.

As with the multi-polar world we inhabit now, you’ll find it's content fluctuating between the rational and emotional, the pragmatic and quixotic, the specific and universal - all in an attempt to honor the multidimensional lives we live and the world in which we live them.

Projects

Entrepreneurship

Majority of my work projects have grown out of intellectual detours that became so gripping that they forced me to abandon any form of original itinerary I had. Over the years, I have helped start and run a long string of ventures, which you dont need to know of because, as of now, my primary attention is aimed at DPE, InfoAFYA™, and LIVEDROOTS projects.

Research 

Research is often something people think has to happen in a lab or an academic setting.

But for me, research is like a personal adventure - something I enjoy doing in my free time too. It involves being curious about the world, seeking evidence, and understanding what’s already out there. Whether I’m digging into data, reading widely, writing up findings, or sharing insights with others, it's all the same. 

Think of what I have described as research as leisure activity. Great researchers are good at finding impactful problems. To this effect, I am currently working on a research project in 2024/2025/2026, see more: AI for Global Health.

Reading

Explore what I am currently reading.

Consulting (when I do have bandwidth to help out)

I usually work with teams at medium to large organizations - on short projects and in some rare cases, 1:1 with senior executives. My consulting style is two fold:

  1. conversational - where clients use me to connect concepts, make inferences, think creatively and imaginatively, think critically, and explore deeper levels of knowing, thinking and understanding - in a conversational sparring manner,
  2. OR, they ask me to facilitate or deliver a certain body of work based on information, data, insights shared beforehand. 

Recent (sample) projects:

  1. Strategic coaching & advisory to business executives interested in refining their organization's innovation thesis and defining new target industries or markets.
  2. Supporting the conceptual design and implementation of transformational software projects that streamline operations and improve efficiency.
  3. Developing data-driven and customer-centric strategies for teams looking to leverage the power of data and AI to better understand their customers, their data, and enhance their offerings.
  4. Conducting technical feasibility studies for nonprofits and governments, ensuring that proposed initiatives are both practical and sustainable.
  5. Researching and presenting new product introduction (NPI) intelligence for startups, providing valuable insights into market trends and consumer preferences to guide their product development efforts.

I also work with leaders at startups that are typically pre-product-market fit stage to post Series A. These types of organizations tend to need exploration of ideas, visions, and concepts that do not have a shape yet. These kinds of clients usually find me directly through a referral. 

The tools

The sensemaking and analytical tools I bring to the table are culled from a professional and personal engagement with disciplines like philosophy, anthropology, literature, history, the arts, strategic thinking, complexity science, and a lifetime tinkering with computers/software. 

I am becoming better and better at product shaping

What ends up in the software is not what your customers want, it’s not what your sales team promised, it’s not what your analysts wrote in the specs. It’s the engineers’ understanding of the domain that determines the software design.

Domain Discovery is how we bridge the knowledge gap. And I happen to be a great domain discoverer/modeler. This can sometimes be thought of as product shaping, where we ask the smart (and the naive) questions, we observe like anthropologists, we dig like archaeologists. We expose how people want business processes to work, and how they work. We uncover ambiguities in the domain language. We find the edge cases, the awkward scenarios where nobody really knows what’s supposed to happen.

Product shaping is primarily business design work. It is also business R&D work. The shaped "thing" might be an interaction concept, design, artifact or any other solution viewed from the business, user’s, or industry perspective. Sometimes it is an architecture. It defines what solution is possible (desirability), how the solution might work (feasibility), where it might fit within existing (and new) business strategies (viability), and it’s expected impact within business, ecosystem, or societal settings (environmental fitness).

This means I work comfortably across all the Technology Readiness Levels ~ from Level 1 - conducting technology ore product introduction feasibility studies, to Level 9 - New Product Introduction and maturity.

Contacting Me

To interact more freely, feel free to:

  1. Connect with me on LinkedIn
  2. If you would like to discuss how I can support your needs, book my calendar or write to me at hi@dennismaorwe.com
  3. More on my Linktree