The former Chief Information Officer at Google, Douglas Merrill championed innovation at the company as it grew from Internet start up into one of the world's most admired organizations.

His latest project is ZestCash.com, a short-term loan service that provides customers with an affordable alternative to traditional payday loan companies.

He 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.

The former Chief Information Officer at Google, Douglas Merrill championed innovation at the company as it grew from Internet start up into one of the world's most admired organizations. His latest project is ZestCash.com, a short-term loan service that provides customers with an affordable alternative to traditional payday loan companies. He 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 the way we work. Informed, passionate and brilliantly counter-intuitive, Merrill now helps companies around the world learn how to build their own sustainable cultures of innovation.

Douglas Merrill is the former CIO and VP of Engineering at Google, where 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 multi-billion dollar business. 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.

Douglas Merrill Speech Topics

Innovate or Die: Building a Culture of Strategy and Innovation

Douglas Merrill provides a rare look into how Google fosters its renowned culture of innovation. In a fast-paced talk, he contrasts Google's strengths with those of other companies that are struggling to stay relevant. The best companies know that innovation is a process you can learn and implement. Merrill lays out a blueprint for innovation as strategy, as culture. How do you foster ideas in their infancy? What corporate structures drive innovations, and which ones get in the way? And how do you recognize the innovation that's already happening in your organization? Innovation, he shows us, is already happening at your organization, at every organization. But the mediocre companies kill it unwittingly. Having championed innovation at Google, Merrill demonstrates, with striking clarity, how to design a different kind of company -- one where culture, strategy and innovation are interrelated and drive massive, sustainable growth.

The Innovators Opportunity: Building the Business of the Future
 
You're at a successful company. You make a great product, and people are buying it. Congratulations. But do you know where your next successful product comes from? Most companies don't. Some companies are counting on their current product growing indefinitely. In fact, the whole notion of focusing on your "core" and ignoring "context" assumes that your core will grow indefinitely. However, most companies face the Innovator's Dilemma: How do we build a new product in an already successful company? Innovation and product development in these companies requires structural change, new kinds of employees, incentive shifts, and management fortitude.  But, if a company gets it right, it can capture the Innovator's Opportunity: Building a new product in the safety of a stable company.  Building on research from RAND, consulting to the world's largest companies in the US and internationally, his experience at Google, and lessons from his own start-ups, Merrill describes proven methods for creating the Innovator's Opportunity.
 
Customer 3.1
 
In the good old days, customers bought what we told them to buy in our ads on television, radio, or billboards. Differences between customers were less important than our ability to revise our product base and capitalize on planned obsolesce.  Although the good old days weren't always good, tomorrow will be as bad as it seems unless we figure out what our customers are going to want. To do that, we need to understand Customer version 3.1. Not version 2.0, that will be history soon, but 3.1, the future. Customer 2.0 was our first view into non-mass markets. However, 3.1 is even more diverse, isn't listening to your ads, and doesn't care about your Facebook page either. Learning about 3.1 requires testing on real customers in real situations. Focus groups don't cut it. Start-up companies have long talked about rapidly learning what your customers want through a "minimally acceptable product". This kind of radical experimentation works for start-ups with 5 people in a garage -- and for some companies like Google -- but isn't easy for mature companies.  Using hos experience at Google, advising companies on innovation, and lessons from his own start-ups, Douglas Merrill provides data -- not just anecdotes -- and methods for learning about tomorrow's customers.

Who Are Your Next Spectacular Employees
 
It's a truism that employee's talent is any organization's most important asset.  However, the definition of "great talent" has changed over the years: Assembly lines require one set of talents, while programming computers require different skills. Even within industries, skills vary: It's likely that a person hired to operate a tape machine will need different skills than a person hired to program. And, as business changes, employees need to change as well. Despite all the media coverage of generational differences, the evidence suggests that generations have had similar skills and abilities. The key is how the employee fits into the business. It's not enough to let your employees have casual Fridays, or give them free food. Tomorrow's business hasn't been created yet. Making that business successful requires organizational and product changes. These, in turn, require hiring new kinds of people, developing your current staff in new ways, and changing their performance evaluations. Using his experience studying teams at RAND, building teams at several companies, and his experience running HR strategy for Schwab, Douglas Merrill offers practical skills about identifying and training the next generation of superstars.