I have to be creative in business, ideas and executive methods, Desmond Marshall

Speaking with Desmond Marshall, businessman, creative thinker, and MD of Rouge International and Rouge ventures

Desmond Marshall has been a creative force in the innovation industry for 25 years, starting in IBM, Microsoft, and then working with luxury retail corporations like Rolls Royce to Innovation like Foxconn, helping them expand the business into different regions.

He is now the founder of Rouge international and has grown from creative strength to strength in the last decade. “Rouge was built more than ten years ago and we started with conducting business advisory and venture capital work on global innovations,” he said.

Desmond discussed how the company has focused on sustainability, and how the connections he has made a lot of difference in terms of staying ahead of competitors. ”Our expertise in the VC field and long term related entities like accelerators and startup organisations has given us a better edge, as there is no such repository and services in the sustainability category”.

Sustainable Future

Mr Marshall spoke about his most recent project the analytical service FUTURE, and how it is purely focused on sustainability solutions. “ Commercial companies and investors wanting to search in this area, to leverage on innovations to become more sustainable, or simply invest in such business, can come to get professional analysis on the most comprehensive engine in the world,” he said. “We have more than 30k companies in store across the world”.

Speaking of why he got involved in FUTURE, Desmond spoke about wanting to invest in sustainability innovations for a long time. “I’ve been a business advisor for more than 11years. We’ve been scouting and investing in innovative companies from the beginning. many years ago, I personally wanted to be more socially sustainable, but we couldn’t find a central repository to easily search for related innovations”

For Desmond, the idea behind FUTURE is of upmost importance  commercial businesses and investors are seeing sustainability to be a mandatory element in their companies and portfolios.” It has always been a powerful idea. but COVID19 seems to be the hammering nail into people’s mindsets. If you can’t even get the idea now, you’re don’t really care about the world”.

Dealing with the pandemic

COVID 19 has had an adverse effect on companies across the globe. Desmond explained to us his business experience of the pandemic. “Hong Kong and Asia have gone through a lot in the last 12 months” he explained. “It makes us all realise what is important and what is not. The biggest insight I found, was being relieved that we invested in 3 years to build FUTURE, as people are finding it hard to find innovation in the area of sustainability innovations”.

In terms of dealing with COVID 19, Desmond highlighted why he believes it to be of great importance that commercial companies adapt to sustainably innovative solutions. “Customers will be more assured to visit a mall that has special air filters or disinfectant robots,” he said.  “Employees will work more efficiently and takes less sick days off if there are air monitors inside the confined rooms and working areas”.

He delved into why modern-day shareholders will want to ensure the safety of the public before considering profit. “investor will see such as basics now and will favour to inject money to a company that is more sustainable in the eyes of the public.  All this means there are actual financial gains and cost efficiencies”.

Before concluding the conversation, Desmond spoke about his inspiration, and what drives him forward as a 21st-century businessman. “In my line of work I have to be creative, in business, ideas and execution methods,” he said. “If I could read topics of any kind from hardcore gene splicing to cooking styles to funny videos posted by the kids. This gives me insights into real behaviours and how tech is being used or invented”.

To find out more about Desmond and his work, he can be found at www.rougevc.com.

More about Irish Tech News and Business Showcase here.

FYI the ROI for you is => Irish Tech News now gets over 1.5 million monthly views, and up to 900k monthly unique visitors, from over 160 countries. We have over 860,000 relevant followers on Twitter on our various accounts & were recently described as Ireland’s leading online tech news site and Ireland’s answer to TechCrunch, so we can offer you a good audience!

Since introducing desktop notifications a short time ago, which notify readers directly in their browser of new articles being published, over 50,000 people have now signed up to receive them ensuring they are instantly kept up to date on all our latest content. Desktop notifications offer a unique method of serving content directly to verified readers and bypass the issue of content getting lost in people’s crowded news feeds.

Drop us a line if you want to be featured, guest post, suggest a possible interview or just let us know what you would like to see more of in our future articles. We’re always open to new and interesting suggestions for informative and different articles. Contact us, by email, twitter or whatever social media works for you and hopefully, we can share your story too and reach our global audience. We are agile, responsive, quick and talented, we look forward to working with you!

If you would like to have your company featured in the Irish Tech News Business Showcase, get in contact with us at [email protected] or on Twitter: @SimonCocking