At a glance
James Woudhuysen is Professor of Forecasting and Innovation at De Montfort University, Leicester.

A St Paul’s School scholar and physics graduate, he has a knack of 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

• helped install and test Britain’s first computer-controlled car park, 1968
• qualified as a tutor in guitar, Inner London Education Authority, 1974
• wrote about chemical Weapons of Mass Destruction, The Economist, 1978
• co-edited a book on the ideas and impact of Albert Einstein, Einstein: the first hundred years, 1980
• identified the user interface as the key issue in the design of IT-based products, 1982
• co-wrote a book on the work of product designers trained at Central St Martin's College of Art and Design Central to design, central to industry, 1982
• wrote an instruction manual for word processing on a portable Commodore 64, 1983
• co-wrote a book on the history, technology and future of robotics, Robots, 1984
• anticipated by two years the conditions that gave rise to the Piper Alpha North Sea oil disaster, The Economist, 1986
• 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, 1995-7
• issued a devastating critique of America’s dot.com boom, Cult IT, 1998/9
• 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, Cultural Trends, 2003
• forecast the travails of US state mortgage agency Freddie Mac, Why is construction so backward?, 2004
• predicted 'stagflation-lite', 2008-2017, in the West, January 2008
• to the clients of Microsoft UK, gave a keynote address and chaired/interviewed Bill Gates, January 2008
• said that after 2010 the price of oil would likely reach $120 a barrel, October 2008.

James 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.