Advisory board

Professor Rafik Loutfy

Dr.Loutfy joined Ryerson University in July 2013 as Innovator-In-Residence, and became the inaugural Director, of the Centre of Engineering Innovation & Entrepreneurship in the Faculty of Engineering & Architectural Science, in July 2014. He had a 30 years long and distinguished career with Xerox Corporation. Loutfy joined Xerox in 1974 as a researcher and held a variety of project and managerial positions at the Xerox Research Centre of Canada (XRCC) including Centre manager. He was appointed vice president in Xerox’s Corporate Research & Technology organization in 1991 and held a variety of VP positions, including vice president of strategy planning and innovation. Loutfy became a corporate officer in 1997 and served as the chief technical officer (CTO) and senior vice president of Xerox Business Group Operations, and vice president of the Wilson Center for Research & Technology in Webster, New York – one of Xerox’s largest research centers, and Director of Corporate Business Strategy.

Loutfy possesses a BSc and MSc in organic chemistry from Ain Shams University in Cairo, Egypt, a PhD in Photochemistry from the University of Western Ontario, and a Master’s of Business Administration (MBA) from the University of Toronto. He holds 32 US patents and has published more than 178 scientific articles.

Paul Barter

Paul Barter is a Management Consultant, Business Professor, Entrepreneur and Venture Investor. He is passionate about innovation and entrepreneurship and focusses on the intersection of technology, business, employment and society in our rapidly changing world. In addition to his consulting and investing activities, Paul supports the next generation of entrepreneurs as an Entrepreneur in Residence at the RIC Centre, a Venture advisor at MaRS Discovery District, an Entrepreneurship advisor at the Schulich School of Business and through events such as this.

Paul also supplements his consulting and advisory work Paul as a researcher, writer, and speaker. His current major focus area is an upcoming book with Co-Author Bob Brehl entitled ‘Who’s Next’ where he describes the effects rapidly changing technologies are having on employment and how students, parents, workers, entrepreneurs, educational institutions, and governments might respond. Paul studied Engineering and Economics at the Undergraduate and then earned an MBA from the Kellogg Schulich program which tends to make him think of most things in competitive strategy terms.

Shane Flynn

Shane has been part of the DMZ since the fall of 2012. He works as a Director, Validator&Alumni Relations atThe DMZ leading the admission process of hopeful applicants, along with managing the sales accelerator program out of the space. Part of his role entails working with the high-potential startups out of the DMZ helping them grow as they begin to formulate a repeatable and scalable business model. Shane graduated with a Bachelor of Commerce degree from the Ted Rogers School of Management at Ryerson University.

Luc Robitaille

Luc Robitaille has joined the Chemistry Industry Association of Canada as VP of Responsible Care in October 2015. The ethics, principles and practices surrounding Responsible Care were developed by Canadian chemical producers more than 30 years ago and they have now been adopted by companies in more than 60 countries around the world. Mr. Robitaille also manages the technical management activities at CIAC. He worked previously in the cement sector for more than 10 years where he chaired the Cement Association environmental committee. Previously he worked as a groundwater remediation consultant, in Canada, the US and west Africa for more than 20 years. He has a Bachelors degree in geological engineering from Universite Laval and a Masters degree in hydrogeology from Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio.

Donald Steny

Donald has a BA in Linguistics from UC Santa Cruz and MS in Information Systems from the University of Oulu. He wrote a natural language parser software and other commercial softwares leading to collaborations with Hewlett-Packard, Bell laboratories, AG communication, Sun Microsystems, and other well-known data centers. He started Web business in 1994 and from that moved into the general area of business. He joined angel groups and helped companies develop their business plans, pitching to investors. Donald is a member of the Venture Capital and Private Equity Roundtable, and has supervised over a thousand pitches. Donald contributes to a project at the Standford university called “the Silicon Valley Network Analysis project”, and has published several papers, book chapters and online articles. Currently, he is a visiting scholar in socialogy at Standford University, and is a keynote speaker on innovation, start-up financing in Silicon Valley and US, Finland, Austria, and teaches classes in the same topics at the University of Oulu, UC Santa Cruz Extension, UCB Extention, SJ State Professional Development, and at Standford University.