Nigel Simpson

Nigel Simpson is a consultant with broad industry experience in technology, innovation, and strategy. He provides expert advice that brings technology into focus for businesses, making sense of new and emerging trends, cutting through hype, and explaining the relationship between vision, current capabilities, and future potential. As a trusted advisor to C-level executives, Nigel maps technology disruption into business strategy and transformational enterprise initiatives that enable companies to leverage new technology and avoid disruption.

His industry experience ranges from startups to global Fortune 100 enterprises in the technology and media and entertainment industries. In a 10-year career at The Walt Disney Company, Nigel successfully led multiple enterprise-wide technology initiatives including cloud transformation, enterprise architecture, open source, and developer enablement. Nigel founded and built Disney’s Open Source Program. He drove open source as company policy, and led cultural change across the company, enabling developers to fully collaborate with the open source community. Nigel established Disney’s Technology Strategy function, a future-focused group exploring the continually evolving interplay of technology, culture, and consumer behavior and its impact on the business.

Prior to Disney, Nigel worked at Sun Labs, the applied research division of Sun Microsystems Inc. where he co-developed an innovative 3D virtual world designed for business collaboration. As a mentor to individuals and startups, Nigel is passionate about enabling others to achieve their full potential. He is a member of the advisory boards of innovative startups in the media and entertainment, and software engineering domains.

Nigel holds multiple patents in areas that include communications and virtual worlds. He graduated from Imperial College, London with a degree in Computing Science.