Sean Silcoff

Globe & Mail Business Reporter
Bestselling Author, Losing The Signal: The Rise and Fall of Blackberry
Canada’s Most Respected Tech Journalist

Sean Silcoff is an award-winning business writer with The Globe and Mail and co-author of Losing the Signal, the critically acclaimed, best-selling story about the rise and fall of BlackBerry.

During his 23-year career in journalism and communications, he has covered just about every area of business, from agriculture to the credit crisis, toys to airplane manufacturing and startups to steel. He previously worked at the National Post as well as Canadian Business Magazine, where he oversaw the publication of the inaugural edition of the Rich 100, the magazine’s annual survey of Canada’s wealthiest people. Sean has won two National Newspaper Awards, the Montreal Economic Institute Economic Education Prize and the Hon. Edward Goff Penney Memorial Prize for Young Canadian Journalists. He led The Globe and Mail’s coverage of the fall of BlackBerry.

Sean has a business degree from Queen’s University and a journalism degree from Carleton University. He lives in Chelsea, Qc. near Ottawa with his wife and three children.

A Future of Disruption

Sean Silcoff discusses the theme of massive disruption that is unfolding in our daily lives, drawing on examples and lessons from the book and the birth and development of the smartphone industry to show how we are only beginning to grapple with the massive upheaval that the pervasive digitization of our daily lives has wrought. The talk would explore how disruptive technologies are no longer just displacing older, less efficient technologies but have undermined more traditional, non-technologically driven businesses like accounting, news and entertainment, transportation and travel and accommodation and will likely threaten far more sectors where technology brings efficiencies and new business models that would have been unthinkable 15 years ago.