Douglas Heintzman

Douglas Heintzman is the practice lead for Blockchain and Disruptive Technologies at the Burnie Group, a management and technology consultancy firm in Toronto, Ontario. He is focused on disruptive technology and its impact on strategy and organizational models as well as the impact of Blockchain on a variety of industries including healthcare, financial services, insurance, transportation and energy.  He works with clients all over the world and presents at public can internal corporate events on Blockchain technology. 

 

Douglas has been in the IT industry for 28 years. He has been an entrepreneur in the mobile context adaptive space as a founder and as a COO. He was at IBM for 25 years, mostly as a headquarters worldwide strategy executive.   He has deep experience in M&A and intellectual property management. 

 

At IBM, Douglas was the WW Director of Technical Strategy for IBM software group, and led WW strategy Collaboration, Smarter Workforce, Portal, and APIs. He also served as IBM's chief open source officer, was the sponsorship executive of the ACM International Computer Programming Contest (world programming championship), chairman of the board of the SyncML Initiative, and was a founder of the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA).

 

Douglas has been a consultant and advisor to a variety of startup and scaleup companies, has keynoted business, government and technical conferences all over the world and has been a policy advisor and expert witness for the European Community, and the US and Canadian governments.  He holds five patents (in the areas of data synchronization, assistive technologies, and audio processing). He sits on the board or directors and chairs the investment committee at MaRS Innovation. He has been a researcher and author focusing on disruptive technologies and investment ecosystem development. He has been an expert panel member of the NSERC Centers of Excellence for the Commercialization of Research (CECR) program, is on the selection committee for the NSERC Synergy Awards for Innovation and is a jury member for the “Robot of the Year” Award for Ethical AI.