James Woudhuysen is a Professor of Forecasting and Innovation at London South Bank University.
A St Paul’s School scholar and physics graduate, he has a knack for registering trends before other people and offering counter-intuitive proposals on what to do about those trends.
The only things James does not forecast are the weather, the stock market, the horses and your own personal destiny.
James Woudhuysen:
- Helped install and test Britain’s first computer-controlled car park, 1968
- Wrote about chemical Weapons of Mass Destruction, The Economist, 1978
- Identified the user interface as the key issue in the design of IT, 1981
- Wrote an instruction manual for word processing on a portable Commodore 64, 83
- Anticipated by two years the Piper Alpha North Sea oil disaster, The Economist, 86
- Led an international multi-client study of consumer e-commerce, 1988
- Advised a top US telecommunications operator to deliver the Web over TV, 1993
- Reorganised worldwide market intelligence at Philips Consumer Electronics,95-7
- Issued a devastating critique of America’s dot.com boom, 1999
- Forecast today’s obsession with work-life balance, 2000
- Upheld 3G mobile communications in the face of massive doubts, The Guardian, 2002
- Highlighted the worldwide boom in gambling games, Cultural Trends, 2003
- Influenced UK government policy in favour of the mass production of housing, 2004.
Watch James Woudhuysen speaking at Sage World
James helps clients to master new trends in society and innovation, so as to implement major shifts in corporate strategy, marketing, branding and design.
He frequently broadcasts about the future of the workplace on Radio 4’s You and Yours and writes a regular column for IT Week (London) and Novo (Frankfurt).
He is also on the editorial boards of New Design and the Journal of Consumer Behaviour.
James has also written extensively about a wide range of energy technologies, from the handling of nuclear waste, the liquefaction of coal, gas turbine generators and drilling for oil through to the management of power in consumer electronics.
His book – Energise – The Future of Energy Innovation (co-authored with Joe Kaplinsky) is a widely researched analysis of the future of energy which enables readers finally to distinguish fact from fiction.
James Woudhuysen has been published in German, Danish, Spanish, Japanese and Chinese. About the future, he has consulted or given keynote speeches for 50 of the world’s top corporations.
As a keynote speaker, his topics include:
- Technology
- Economics
- Politics
- Sociology of Innovation in Energy
- IT
- Retailing
- Cities
- Manufacturing
- Engineering
- Housing
- Transport