Alex Ryan is VP of MaRS Solutions Lab. He most enjoys bringing diverse groups of participants together to jointly innovate on society’s most complex and important challenges. Alex Ryan is co-founder of the innovation and collaboration agency Synthetikos Inc. and also co-founded 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, where he developed a new course: Designing in a Whitewater World. As a consultant with Booz Allen Hamilton, Alex Ryan previously helped introduce operational and strategic design into the U.S. Army. He is co-founder of the Systemic Design Research Network and serves on several boards including the Participatory City and the Energy Futures Lab. His dissertation in applied mathematics advanced a multidisciplinary approach to complex systems design.