About James At a glance

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.

 



         
         
    Email me on James@Woudhuysen.com