Green Imaging's Founder Trades the CEO Chair for a Bigger Technology Mandate

Fredericton's Green Imaging Technologies has split its top job in two. Effective July 15, Norm Couturier — the company's chief operating officer for the past two years — becomes chief executive officer, while co-founder Derrick Green steps out of the CEO chair into a newly created chief technology officer role. The company announced the change as a deliberate split between commercial scale-up and technology development; Entrevestor reported the appointments Friday.

Why split the job

The board's framing is that one executive can no longer give both fronts the attention they merit. "By dedicating our strongest commercial leader to the CEO role and channelling Derrick's extraordinary technology expertise into an elevated CTO mandate, we are positioning GIT to pursue growth and innovation at a pace and depth that a unified executive model simply cannot match," said board chair David Wagner in the company's statement.

Couturier said he intends to extend the commercial momentum he built as COO: "GIT's best opportunities are ahead of us, and I am ready to lead this company toward them." Green cast his own move as a promotion of purpose rather than a demotion of title: "This is not a step back — it is a step deeper into the work that I am most passionate about," pointing to the company's engineering and R&D teams as his new focus.

The company credits the past two years — Couturier's tenure as COO — with expanding customer relationships, new market channels, and a strengthening intellectual property portfolio.

A quiet global niche out of UNB

Green Imaging is one of those Fredericton firms that is better known in Houston and Aberdeen than on its own street. It builds Nuclear Magnetic Resonance imaging technology for rock core analysis — software for the GeoSpec NMR core analyzer line, the ImaCore 3D MRI-based core imager, pulse-sequence development tools, and a full-service NMR lab — and says its products are used in roughly 90 per cent of NMR/MRI laboratories worldwide, counting national and multinational oil companies, oilfield service firms, research facilities and universities among its customers.

The origin story runs through the University of New Brunswick: Dr. Bruce Balcom of the UNB MRI Research Centre invited Dr. Green to assess commercializing an NMR-based capillary-pressure measurement, and Derrick and Jill Green founded the company in 2006, working first from a small office on the UNB campus.

Beyond its oil and gas base, the company has been positioning NMR as a measurement tool for the energy transition — carbon storage reservoir evaluation and in-situ mining characterization are now headline markets on its site. A CTO with a long-horizon mandate fits that pivot: the technology is the competitive asset, as Green put it, and it now has a dedicated executive owner.

Sources

• Couturier Named CEO of Green Imaging — Entrevestor, July 31, 2026: appointments, July 15 effective date, Wagner quote, company background
• Green Imaging Technologies Inc. appoints new CEO — company release (PRNewswire, July 15, 2026): full Wagner, Couturier and Green statements, growth rationale
• Green Imaging — product line (GeoSpec software, ImaCore 3D, ProLab), ~90% of NMR/MRI labs claim, oil & gas / carbon storage / in-situ mining markets, lab services
• Our Story — Green Imaging — UNB MRI Research Centre origin, Jill and Derrick Green founding