Dan Herman is a Toronto-based innovation policy expert, lecturer and an independent filmmaker.

His film projects include having been the director and producer of Magnetic Cities, an 18 part documentary series on the most innovative and dynamic cities around the world for startups, that airs on News Forum in Canada as of May 2024. This project builds on an online content series entitled "Their World, Our Future," that profiles dynamic startup founders from 15 countries across the Global South.

His other film  work includes "Made with Bravery: the story of Ukrainian Startup Resilience" that tells the story of how the first six months of the 2022 full scale invasion of Ukraine affected Ukraine's startup ecosystem. He returned to Kyiv in February 2024 to film a new project that will be available in late 2024.

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Dan is also a lecturer at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto where he teaches a class on the evolution of the global innovation economy, and how startups from everywhere are competing and winning on the global stage.

Previously, Dan was the co-founder of the Centre for Digital Entrepreneurship and Economic Performance (DEEP Centre) and thereafter served as the Government of Canada's Executive Director of Innovation Policy at the Department of Innovation, Science and Economic Development from 2016 to 2018. In 2019 Dan was named to the Government of Ontario's Expert Panel on Intellectual Property and in 2021 he was appointed as the Government of Ontario's Special Advisor on the Establishment of a Centralized Resource Entity on Intellectual Property. Dan has also held executive level roles in the private sector, including having been Vice President Strategy for a Toronto-based consumer hardware startup, and co-founder of a failed artificial intelligence startup.

Dan holds a PhD in Political Economy from the Balsillie School of International Affairs and is also a graduate of the London School of Economics.