Douglas Merrill

Douglas Merrill is the former Chief Information Officer at Google. Put another way: he championed innovation at one of the world's most innovative companies. In his passionate keynotes, Merrill draws on real world experience to help companies build their own thriving, strategic, and sustainable cultures of creativity.

Douglas Merrill brings to his keynotes a rich real-world perspective on innovation as strategy, as culture, while delivering an overview of how new technologies have changed the way we live and work. As the former CIO and VP of Engineering at Google, he oversaw a team of 1,500, as well as all aspects of technology, and several high profile projects, one of which, Google Checkout, is now a multi-billion dollar business. Informed, passionate and brilliantly counter-intuitive, Merrill now helps companies around the world learn how to build their own sustainable cultures of innovation. Merrill's latest project is ZestFinance.com, a Big Data fuelled underwriting and short-term loan service that provides customers with an affordable alternative to traditional payday loan companies.

Merrill has also served as COO of New Music at EMI Group, and as VP of Infrastructure and HR Strategy at Charles Schwab. In academia, he was an Information Scientist at the RAND Corporation. He holds a Ph.D. in cognitive science from Princeton and is the author of Getting Organized in the Google Era: How to Get Stuff Out of Your Head, Find It When You Need It, and Get It Done Right.