Bio
Avinash Rao
Avinash Rao is a Head of Consulting and Services at Innovation Roots. As a seasoned Business Leader with over 24 years of experience, Avinash specializes in Digital Transformation, Product Leadership, DevOps, and Lean Agile Transformations. He is an expert in driving Zero To One journeys, setting up and scaling delivery, sales, and marketing teams from scratch.
Ravishankar N
With over 35 years of experience in the IT industry, he is a seasoned professional specializing in cybersecurity, AI security, and enterprise technology strategy. He is a Contributing Author on AI Security for the OWASP AI Exchange, a conference speaker, and an active research and conference paper reviewer with more than 40 publications to his credit. He currently serves as a Professor at CHRIST (Deemed to be University), where he contributes to teaching, research, and academic leadership in emerging technologies and cybersecurity. Prior to joining academia, he held senior leadership roles in the industry, including Director – Cyber Security Consulting at TCS and Principal Consultant – Enterprise Quality Solutions at Infosys.
He holds multiple global certifications, including:
- Google Professional Cloud Security Engineer
- Google Cloud Digital Leader
- ISC2 – Certified in Cyber Security
Session Title
Kanban for Industry-Academia interface
Overview
This session explores how the principles of Kanban and the idea of Flow, long associated with technology and operations, can be meaningfully applied within a University setting. It is built on the collaboration between the first author, who spent over twenty-five+ years in industry before moving into academia to strengthen industry linkages, and the second author, a consulting leader who together partnered on several initiatives connecting classroom and corporate contexts.
They worked on three areas across University and Industry – Domain context sessions, internships and placements, and joint academic–industry papers. Each of these has its own rhythm and interpretation of Flow and Value. In Domain context sessions, the flow is about how ideas move between practice and theory, keeping pace with the fast-changing language of industry while respecting the more reflective tempo of academia. In internships and placements, flow becomes the movement of talent—how students evolve from learning to contribution, and how this pipeline is managed amid differing expectations of readiness and speed in picking up new technologies v/s studying the fundamentals. In joint papers, flow is intellectual, shaped by the interplay between academic rigor and consulting pragmatism.
The session reflects on how these varied streams can be visualized, managed, and improved using Kanban thinking. It also looks at how traditional academic processes, especially audits, often resist being seen as workflows, yet can benefit from being reframed through flow-based visualization and incremental improvement.
