Dr. Alex Ryan
SVP, Partner Solutions
MaRS

Alex Ryan leads partner solutions at MaRS, helping government and corporate partners accelerate the adoption of innovation in their organizations, markets and cities. He oversees teams that are helping decarbonize electricity grids, design inclusive smart cities, improve community health and well-being, employ thousands of NEET youth, strengthen the impact investing market, and grow Canada’s innovation economy. His writing on smart cities, data governance, policy innovation, social innovation, systemic design, and complex systems science has been published by the World Economic Forum, Fast Company, Axios, Stanford Social Innovation Review, and Complexity.

Alex is also co-founder of Alberta CoLab, the first provincial government innovation lab in Canada. He is an executive-in-residence at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. And as a consultant with Booz Allen Hamilton, Alex previously helped introduce operational and strategic design into the U.S. Army, and established strategic design capabilities for U.S. Strategic Command, U.S. Special Operations Command, and U.S. Cyber Command. He serves on several advisory boards, including Participatory City and Energy Futures Lab. His dissertation in applied mathematics advanced a multidisciplinary approach to complex systems design.