I know many outstanding female futurists, so whenever I am asked I point to a range of exceptional futurists to show that there are indeed many women in the field. However it is true that many are not as well known as they should be.
As such I thought it would be useful to compile a list of the world’s top female futurists, for those who are looking for diversity in their insights into the future. The following list, compiled with the help of my team member Vanessa Cartwright, provides a brief profile of 143 [up from 78 in the original list] fabulous female futurists.
It is tricky defining a futurist, so while we have largely selected those who describe themselves as working in this space, we have also included others whose work is largely that of exploring the future.
We have limited this list to those who have a significant profile and impact, but I’m sure we have missed some who should be included. If you would like to suggest other prominent female futurists we should consider for updates to this list, please complete the form at the end of this page.
Detailed list – in alphabetical order
Location: Somerset West, South Africa
Serving a wide range of clients in South Africa and across the world, Tanja Hichert and her consulting firm Hichert & Associates specialize in scenario planning and strategic risk management. Hichert’s public sector work, in association with Africa’s top-rated think tank, the South African Institute for International Affairs , includes projects on the future of sub-Saharan trade agreements and the future of agriculture in Africa. Hichert also conducts workshops on topics such as the future of transport and the future of migration, and she has trained the Joint Command of the South African National Defence Force on applying complexity thinking to decision-making. Hichert is a director of the Southern African node of the Millennium Project and helped organize the first African Futures Conference. As a Board member of the Association of Professional Futurists, she co-organized the APF’s first Africa gathering on the theme of “Anticipation, complexity and future”.Website Twitter: @TanjaHichert
Location: Johannesburg, South Africa
“Africa needs to come to grips with owning her future.” This insight from futures thinker Dr. Geci Karuri-Sebina is pivotal to her work and sense of purpose. Karuri-Sebina wants to see deliberate futures thinking integrated into every level of African society. She is hopeful that the right amount of planning can glean positive results for her native South Africa and the broader African continent. With a PhD in Planning and Innovation Studies, and a Master’s degree in Architecture, Urban Design and Urban Planning, Karuri-Sebina has a sound knowledge base for her work as Executive Manager of programs at the South African Cities Network . Karuri-Sebina also serves as a director for the Southern Africa node of the Millennium Project and an associate of the Institute for Economic Research on Innovation . She finds the futures field “important and pervasive” and believes that her research, publications and advice are contributing to “something bigger: long-term change and benefit for humanity”.LinkedIn Twitter: @geci
Location: Cairo, Egypt
Dr. Nisreen Lahham enjoys the trans-disciplinary nature of futurism. She has worked on projects about diverse issues such as water security, the future of energy, the future of youth, intelligent buildings, the development of cities over the next few decades, and planning for Egypt in 2030. She has particular knowledge of architecture and urban planning, including a PhD which applied Delphi technique to predict the impacts of introducing tourism to heritage areas. Lahham’s career includes founding the Future Studies Forum to promote strategic ties between sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, and working as the Executive Manager of the Center for Future Studies at the Information and Decision Support Center in Cairo. Her Foresight for Development profile profile reveals one of her favorite quotes: “If you don’t create your future, the others will do, according to their own agenda.”Website Twitter: @NisreenLahham
Location: Kenya
Katindi Sivi Njonjo is a futurist from Kenya who is a passionate believer in the power of foresight. In an interview with Foresight for Development , Njonjo discusses the many benefits that foresight methodologies can bring to African governments, including “proactive policies and legislation”, “better solutions to complex problems”, “reducing the number of catastrophes”, and “better use of resources”. Njonjo works as Lead Consultant for LongView Consult , a socio-economic research and policy analysis firm that she founded in 2014. Previously she served as Programme Director for the Society for International Development , and, before that, Futures Programme Officer at the Institute of Economic Affairs . Njonjo has pioneered research in youth demographics and inequality, including conducting workshops across Kenya to ask young people directly what they feel their future might look like. She contributed her knowledge of the needs of youth, gender, and vulnerable groups to Kenya’s Vision 2030 team.LinkedIn Twitter: @Katindisivi
Location: Cape Town, South Africa
Merle O’Brien leads foresight and innovation for Lacuna , a global boutique innovation management firm with clients such as Porsche, Distell and Nedbank. During her Masters of Philosophy in Future Studies, O’Brien explored “what the world would be like in 2030 when we reach human-machine intelligence parity in a world of unbridled creativity”. She defied the scepticism of her male classmates by persisting in her research and starting Creation iLab as an outlet for her ideas. In an article for the Cape Times about why the world needs more women futurists , O’Brien writes, “We have to evolve ourselves out of the story which history wrote for today’s women. If we want products and services to meet our growing unmet needs, more women will need to become futurists, design innovators, scientists and inventors. Being a futurist is not a nine to five job, but a lifestyle rooted in a deep and abiding commitment to create a preferable future for the world.”Website Twitter: @merleobrien
Location: Islamabad, Pakistan
The future of media, communications and journalism is a key focus of Puruesh Chaudhary, the Founder and President of AGAHI Pakistan , a knowledge collaboration and information sharing initiative. As a development and strategic communications professional, Chaudhary works with non-profits, aid agencies, news organizations, and multinationals. She is leading the Pakistan Foresight Initiative on challenges such as national security, human capital development, and ICT. Her efforts to champion quality journalism have seen her appointed as the Ambassador to Pakistan of the Center for International Media Ethics . She also chairs the Planning Committee of the Millennium Project in Pakistan and leads the Islamabad Hub as a Global Shaper recognized by the World Economic Forum .Website Twitter: @puruesh
Location: Singapore
Cheryl Chung is a Lead Strategist in the Futures Division of Singapore’s Ministry of Transport . Her work focuses on the intersection of technology, economic policy, and regulatory policy. She has led foresight and strategy initiatives across several departments of the Government of Singapore over the past decade. Chung developed the curriculum and conducted training for the government’s in-house futures course, Futurecraft. She led a research project on the Future of Data and investigated topics such as 3D printing, social enterprise, and the evolving role of the state. She co-led the public service’s Emerging Strategic Issues exercise, which was recognized as “most innovative project” at the PS21 ExCEL Awards 2013. Chung has been a Co-Curator of TEDxSingapore, and she continues to advise teams of undergraduate students about their management consulting projects for clients in the social sector.LinkedIn
Location: Azerbaijan
Reyhan Huseynova is a futures thinker who in 2006 established the Azerbaijan Future Studies Society and opened the Azerbaijan Node of the Millennium Project . She is the Chair of both the Society and the Node and has been nominated as an Ambassador for Peace for her work in the non-profit space. Over the years Huseynova has participated in international conferences and workshops, led the UNFPA project “Combating Gender Based Violence, and taught Azerbaijan’s adolescents about safe and responsible sexual and reproductive behavior. She has worked at Western University in Baku in the disciplines of Political Science, Western Studies and Western Languages. Huseynova has also managed the online course on Azerbaijan Foresight at the Azerbaijan State Economic University, computed the first Azerbaijan State of the Future Index, and overseen a national youth contest on Global Challenges Facing Humanity. One of her focuses is building networks between Azerbaijani people and researchers across the world.Website
Location: Beijing, China
Professor Zhouying Jin holds a variety of prominent positions in the futures field. She is a senior researcher and professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, where she is the Director of the Center for Technology Innovation and Strategy Studies. She is also the President and founder of the Beijing Academy of Soft Technology, and the author of Global Technological Change: From Hard Technology to Soft Technology Future 500 China . In an interview with The Futurist magazine , Jin observed, “The important thing is how society—from the top leadership to the local officers—changes the thinking model from the traditional development model that everybody is pursuing, based on money, to green development. And it’s not just an environmental perspective. There are also the social and economic components that we must include if we are to have a harmonious society of smart growth.”Website
Location: Singapore
Ayesha Khanna is an entrepreneur and expert on the future of education, technology, and urbanization. As the CEO and Co-Founder of The Keys Academy , Khanna has developed an “externships” model where secondary school students can apply their skills to critical twenty-first century industries. Khanna is also the Chairman and Founder of e-learning platform and digital provider Applied Skills , and the Chairman and Co-Founder of Factotum , a content marketing agency that creates thought leadership branding. In addition, Khanna co-founded the research and advisory group Hybrid Reality Institute, and she founded 21C GIRLS , a non-profit that provides free coding and robotics classes for girls in Singapore. She has directed the Future Cities Group at the London School of Economics, where she is currently completing her PhD on urban information infrastructures. Khanna is often quoted in leading business publications and her latest book is titled Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization Website Twitter: @ayeshakhanna1
Location: Taipei in Taiwan, the Sunshine Coast in Australia, and Novi Sad in Serbia
Professor Ivana Milojević is a researcher and educator who specializes in futures studies, as well as sociology, gender studies, and peace studies. She has authored over 60 journal articles and book chapters, many with a focus on educational futures. Some of her related topics include feminism, globalization, poverty, conflict in Serbia, and the impact of gender issues on western education and schooling. Milojević works closely with Professor Sohail Inayatullah, one of the world’s most prominent futures scholars, to compile “cybraries of articles ” from futurists across Australia.
Website
Location: Singapore
Joan Moh heads the Center for Strategic Futures (CSF) in the Prime Minister’s Office of Singapore’s Public Division. She has an important role to play in assisting the Singapore Government to navigate strategic challenges and opportunities. Moh shared her experience, insights and findings at the Asia Pacific Region Futures Studies Forum. In CSF’s Foresight 2015 publicationWebsite
Location: Seoul, South Korea
Youngsook Park uses her foresight skills to promote social justice and human development. She is the Chair and President of the South Korean Node of the Millennium Project and the author of the 2018 UN State of the Future report, Korean edition. Park has represented South Korea in future-themed events such as the World Future Conference and has spoken at TedxYonsei. She assists South Korean universities with research and teaching on future housing and interior design, social welfare, and future prediction. According to the KNU Times , Park established the Korean Foster Care Association because “Korea is facing a low birth rate and an aging population, which will produce many social problems, and I don’t want my home country to suffer in that way.” Having a keen awareness of the value of foresight, Park advised the students at Kyungpook National University that “studying the future is not an option but a prerequisite for us to survive”.Website
Location: New Taipei City, Taiwan
Mei-Mei Song is Assistant Professor at the Graduate Institute of Future Studies, Tamkang University. Song specializes in the future of education and the future of globalization. She studied her Doctor of Education at Columbia University, with a focus on leadership. Song has written a wide variety of publications on topics such as future teachers, sustainability in universities, and students exploring futurology. At a Futures Research, Education and Action Meet in Finland during June 2015, Song presented on Three floors for the six pillars of futures thinking : Pedagogical suggestions for futures education”. She also co-presented on “The Futures of artificial companions : Scenarios of human-artificial companions relationship”.LinkedIn
Location: Istanbul, Turkey
As Turkey’s first woman futurist keynote speaker, Ufuk Tarhan is in high demand in her home country and internationally. Tarhan founded M-GEN Future Planning Center in 2006 to consult to individuals and businesses and, more recently, to provide digital agency services. A recurring theme in Tarhan’s conferences and lectures is “creating a better future”. She has helped to design courses on futurism at several universities in Turkey, as well as being President of the Turkish Futurists Association from 2009 to 2012. With a background in economics and IT, as well as experience in sectors as diverse as telecommunications, pharmaceuticals and agriculture, Tarhan is well placed to advise a variety of stakeholders. She has written for Harvard Business Review , Turkey and published her own books on shaping the future through strategy. As a designer and curator for Future Day , Tarhan would like the 1st of March each year to be an international public holiday dedicated to the future.Website Twitter: @futuristufuk
Location: Adelaide, Australia
A futurist who combines academic rigour with hands-on action is Dr. Kristin Alford. As the founding director of foresight agency Bridge8 , Alford develops both big picture foresight and detailed implementation strategies for a wide variety of desired futures. Alford came to futurism following careers in engineering, human resources, product development and strategy for prominent companies in sectors as diverse as aviation and nanotechnology. One of her passions is exploring realistic visions for a sustainable environment, economy, and society. As part of this mission, Alford co-organized and facilitated the Australia 2050 workshop with the Australian Academy of Sciences, as well as leading a forum on smart cities and developing frameworks for science engagement in South Australia. The organizer for TEDxAdelaide, Alford helps to grow and disseminate big ideas around the world.Website Twitter: @kristinalford
Location: Sydney, Australia
Rachel Botsman is one of the world’s most influential thought leaders on the power of collaboration and sharing to transform the way we live, work and consume. She helped inspire the “sharing economy” with her book “What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption Website Twitter: @rachelbotsman
Location: Sydney, Australia
According to Strategy, Innovation and Foresight Consultant Janine Cahill, “Everyone’s got talent—it’s how we tease it out of them that counts.” This philosophy inspired her to found Teazl , a mobile learning platform that helps companies educate their employees. Teazl aims to do for eLearning what teazels did for textiles back in the Industrial Revolution: revolutionize an already strong industry. Cahill’s background in psychology, app creation and change management has seen her develop experiential learning and simulations for over 20 years. Her experience in a variety of industries from banking to consulting to energy has led her to teach futures thinking, design award-winning employee engagement strategies for large corporates, and build a number of organizations. She currently heads the Future Journeys strategic foresight consultancy and works as a director for the app maker Game Gurlz in addition to being the CEO of Teazl.Website Twitter: @j9j
Location: Melbourne, Australia
Understanding the inner workings of universities and their management structures has helped foresight practitioner Maree Conway to consult on the future of universities, among other topics. A life-changing moment for Conway was when she was asked in 1999 to integrate foresight approaches into the planning framework of Swinburne University of Technology. This role inspired her passion for futures work, and she hasn’t looked back. With qualifications in Strategic Foresight, Education Management, Media Studies and History, including a PhD on university management in progress, Conway is well positioned as a futures researcher. She is the founder of Thinking Futures , an organization that assists professionals, non-profits, and people in education and government to plan for the future. Changing how clients think, moving them beyond the status quo, and immersing them in meaningful and adaptable strategies are key aspects of Conway’s craft.Website Twitter: @MareeConway
Location: Adelaide, Australia
Kristina Dryža is an independent trend forecaster, keynote speaker and published author who advises major international companies on how to express their visions for the future. She has worked on branding strategies, event management, innovation, new product development, scenario planning and more with organizations including Sony Ericsson, The Body Shop, Vodafone, and Unilever. Dryža attributes her skill at identifying consumer trends to her “international lifestyle, global networks, strategic visioning skills, and embrace of creative and intellectual diversity”. Although Dryža identifies as a futurist, she confesses on her Twitter profile that she is “really a nowist”. The theme of living in the now and listening to nature’s rhythms is explored in her allegorical novel, Grace and the Wind Website Twitter: @KristinaDryza
Location: Canberra, Australia
Dr. Wendy Elford enjoys investigating the latest developments in the world of work. She collects stories of success and failure to help design good working environments, habits, and strategies. Elford firmly believes that “better work means more engaged, healthier and more productive people and more successful businesses”. To this end, Elford works as an organizational design consultant and academic. She assists business leaders to adapt job design and workspaces to new ways of working. Elford has a background as a physiotherapist and has worked as a Director of the consultancy Ergonomics by Design . This position has seen her develop astute change management skills while working on some unusual projects, including how to handle and lift patients in healthcare, prevent reversing accidents, and make supermarket checkouts more efficient. Elford holds a PhD in Environmental Design, and the title of her dissertation was “Emerging issues in ergonomics: A methodological framework for foresight and sensemaking”.Website Twitter: @DrWendyDE
Location: Sydney, Australia
Shara Evans is a futurist, keynote speaker, technologist and trend forecaster. As the founder and CEO of Market Clarity , an award-winning telecommunications analyst firm, Evans develops advanced tools for tracking, analyzing and presenting information on Australian telecommunications infrastructure and services. Evans’s involvement in the telecoms industry began with her work as a software engineer in the early 1980s. In order to start her own data services and market research company, Telsyte, in 1997, she fused her engineering background with her “intuitive understanding of how society is likely to respond to new technologies”. This powerful combination has helped her become one of Australia’s leading futurists in the telecommunications space. Evans is currently researching the theme of Future Tech 2025, which sees her interview thought leaders on a wide array of topics, from holograms to drones to wearables. Her keynote speaking topics range from Cyber Crime to Flying Robots and Inspiring Women in Technology.Website Twitter: @shara_evans
Location: Melbourne, Australia
As a postformal psychologist, futures researcher and leading international thinker, Jennifer Gidley is committed to promoting global change. She dedicates her writing and research to raising awareness about “the urgency for ‘new thinking’ to navigate the complexity of increasingly urbanised global futures”. Gidley’s specialties include educational and youth futures and sustainable urban development. Having worked closely with many universities around the world and having published over 50 academic papers , Gidley has a solid knowledge base that helps her to develop courses and curriculums. Her innovations in education have positively influenced hundreds of women, children, and young people. As President of the World Futures Studies Federation , Gidley represents the world’s leading futures academics from over 60 countries.Website Twitter: @WFSFPres
Location: Brisbane, Australia
Jeanne Hoffman is completing her PhD on the futures of China. Her research on “Alternative Images of China, 2035” and “Unpacking Images of China Using Causal Layered Analysis” won awards from the Association of Professional Futurists . Hoffman worked in the Queensland government for over 10 years in a variety of fields: economic modeling, strategic planning, scenario planning, development and analysis of transport surveys, project management, policy development, performance management, and business planning. She has significant experience in training other people, conducting workshops, and writing reports about the future. Originally from Hawaii and Colorado, she has lived in South Korea, Taiwan, and England, and now resides in Queensland, Australia.Website
Location: Sydney, Australia
Dominique Jaurola is a digital transformation business founder, incubator and futurist. In the 1990s, she led change and innovation for massive market growth in mobile devices at Nokia and was instrumental in instituting futures thinking at the company. She drove new approaches for human-centric thinking by founding SocialWare; a team delivering human and market insights from 30+ countries in order to help Nokia design its strategy, product, design and marketing. Jaurola then spent the early 2000s building experience at a range of companies, including Computer Sciences Corporation, before founding Hunome in 2008. Hunome is an online application and tool for thought networking. As CEO of Hunome, Jaurola looks “to make a difference to how we humans can bring together the various ways in which we understand ourselves”.Website Twitter: @dojau
Location: Adelaide, Australia
Dr. Patricia Kelly is a Senior Lecturer at the University of South Australia who specializes in sustainable futures and futures thinking, education methodology, and engineering education. She is also a Consulting Editor of the Journal of Futures Studies from Tamkang University, Taiwan. One of Kelly’s research focuses is “Globo Sapiens”, a conception of 21st century graduates as “wise, global citizens willing to think critically and to assume responsibility for their impact on communities and the planet”. She has also focused on the sustainability of higher education, staff development, and embedding communication and teamwork skills into engineering and ICT education. In 2014 Kelly was awarded a Citation for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning . She believes that the “embedded approach” of her trans-disciplinary team of university staff has improved “not only teamwork and communication skills, but also intercultural skills and global competencies”.Website
Location: Western Australia
Janelle Marr worked in business advisory services at both KPMG and Ernst & Young before taking the leap of starting her own management consultancy, StepBeyond Business Advisors . She had identified a need for high-quality strategic advisory services in Perth, especially across the health and community services sectors. Her work at StepBeyond spans futures, strategy, sustainability, governance and risk management, operational performance improvement, leadership development, and change management. Marr has held a variety of Board positions and is currently on the Board of ScreenWest and Diabetes Western Australia. She is also a Non-Executive Director of the Ability Centre that supports people with disabilities, and has previously contributed to WA’s Community Arts Network, Mosaic Community Care, and the Sustainability Practitioners Association. In 2012 Marr was awarded a 40Under40 WA Business News Award for her contribution to community services and her entrepreneurial achievements.Website Twitter: @Janelle_Marr
Location: Wellington, New Zealand
Wendy McGuinness is a futurist fascinated by public policy. As the founder and Chief Executive of the McGuinness Institute. , a non-partisan think tank working towards a sustainable future, McGuinness is interested in exploring how New Zealand might secure its long-term future and become an exemplar for the world. She is a Fellow Chartered Accountant who specializes in risk management, public sector reporting, and future studies. She has attended five World Future Society conferences, co-authored the book Nation Dates: Significant events that have shaped the nation of New Zealand Project 2058 . McGuinness also sits on the board of Katherine Mansfield Birthplace—the home of New Zealand’s most famous author—and is a member of Women’s Leaders Lunches.Website Twitter: @McGInstitute
Location: Melbourne, Australia
After a decade of working as a consultant, Rowena Morrow discovered that organizations from a wide variety of industries had a common craving: they wanted “to investigate what might be possible rather than to settle for what is presently available or delivered”. Morrow now works as the Innovation Leader at the City of Boroondara municipality, a role that combines her experience in consulting and educating people about the future. With a Master of Science in Strategic Foresight and several years of teaching and designing foresight programs, Morrow co-founded Prospective Services Consulting with fellow consultant and educator Peter Hayward. They focus on building futures thinking capacity, foresight literacy and anticipatory leadership in individuals, who can then apply their skills in group and organizational contexts.Website Twitter: @prospective
Location: Wellington, New Zealand
Stephanie Pride is a professional futurist who leads the StratEDGY Strategic Foresight consultancy. She started her career in Oxford, England, where she advocated for welfare rights and led responses to youth homelessness after studying her BA (Honours) in English. Then came work as a lecturer, a women’s employment coordinator, and a policy manager for the New Zealand Department of Labour. For nearly 11 years, Pride designed and led the New Zealand State Service Commission’s Futures Program. She also completed a PhD on literary theory and colonialism, and advised secondary educators on systems change in education. Pride has been a Board member of Shaping Tomorrow’s Foresight Network and the New Zealand Futures Trust. She helped to found FutureMakers Network (New Zealand) and Foresight Network (International).Website Twitter: @StephaniePride
Location: Melbourne, Australia
Elizabeth Rudd is a consultant with strong capabilities in strategic thinking, planning and foresight. She is the Director of the FutureNous consultancy, and also the Director of Milestone Learning , which specializes in leadership development, sales, and personal development solutions. Rudd has lectured for the Master of Strategic Foresight Program at Swinburne University of Technology. She has a solid understanding of technology and its ability to deliver business outcomes. She also has experience in project management that has seen her work for Ernst & Young and Sensis. Rudd is a member of the Association of Professional Futurists , the World Future Society, and Women on Boards .
Website Twitter: @IM_Innovation
Location: Perth, Australia
Leaving a better world for future generations is important to Dr. Anita Sykes-Kelleher, a futurist and strategist who leads her own consultancy network, Designer Futures . The name of her business was inspired by Edward de Bono’s quote, “You can analyze the past but you need to design the future.” Sykes-Kelleher has worked on a wide variety of projects, including the Future of Manufacturing for CSIRO, World Water Scenarios for UNESCO, and industries mapping and analysis for creative practitioners in Perth, Western Australia. She has been a contributing author for the Millennium Project’s State of the Future publication and for Kosmos journal . She wrote her PhD on the Future of Global Governance and presented her recommendations for reform before the UN.Website Twitter: @anita_kelleher
Location: London, UK
Dr. Rachel Armstrong is a futures thinker, materials scientist and sustainability innovator who investigates “living architecture”, a concept based on the capacity for buildings to share some of the properties of living systems. Armstrong is Professor of Experimental Architecture at the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape at the University of Newcastle, England. She works collaboratively across disciplines to build prototypes of future architectural innovations. Armstrong is also the pioneer of “Black Sky Thinking ”, which involves bringing the unknown into the present in a way that has immediate effects and engages others. Her awards include mentions in the 2014 Citizens of the Next Century List , the 2013 Icon Magazine Future 50 , and Director Magazine’s 2012 list of ten people who may shape the UK’s recovery.Website Twitter: @livingarchitect
Location: Rome, Italy
Eleonora Barbieri Masini has been actively involved in futures studies since the 1970s. She taught futures studies at Gregorian University in Rome from 1976 to 2004 and spent a decade as President of the World Futures Studies Federation from 1980 to 1990. Her major interests include changes in values, the role of women in the future, and the principles and methodologies of future studies. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Barbieri Masini coordinated projects for UNESCO that focused on networking and solidarity among women, and the futures of cultures. She has authored an impressive variety of publications over the last three decades. Her involvement in Boards and Councils has spanned the Editorial Board of the professional journal Futures , the Scientific Council of the Italian World Wildlife Fund, and the Social Sciences Committee, UNESCO Italian Commission.Website
Location: London, UK
Futures researcher Jessica Bland works at UK-based innovation charity Nesta . She explores how to best support the responsible development of disruptive technology. This includes organizing events on new technologies such as drones and DIY biology, working on foresight methodology, and advising others on horizon scanning, science and policy. Bland was previously Senior Policy Adviser at the Royal Society, the UK’s National Academy of Science, where she led insights into science as an open enterprise. She is active in the public arena as a guest speaker and a blogger on political science for The Guardian .
Website Twitter: @pesska
Location: London, UK
Elaine Cameron is the resident futurist of Burson-Marsteller , a leading global public relations and communications firm. She leads the firm’s FUTURE Perspective Group across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Cameron examines the mega trends that influence consumer behaviours, delivers trendspotting master classes, and writes and speaks on a broad range of future-related topics. Some of Cameron’s writings can be found on SlideShare and Storify . She is a member of the World Future Society and London Futurists, and a regular participant at future-themed conferences. In a reflection on the future of communications , Cameron writes of the importance of challenging traditional thinking and practice in public relations, and transitioning towards knowledge sharing and effective storytelling.LinkedIn Twitter: @FUTUREPersp
Location: Barcelona, Spain
A self-styled “future lifestyles detective ”, Laura Clèries works as a freelance consultant, designer and university lecturer. She aims to inspire individuals and organizations and to help them innovate. Her clients have included Panasonic, FINSA and PBP Home Textiles. With both scientific and design backgrounds, Clèries works at the intersections between technology, trends, future products, textiles, colour and materials, and innovation. She holds 20 years of international professional experience in a wide range of organizations, including forecasting publications firms, fashion designers, libraries, and materials companies. Clèries has a “sustained passion for innovation, materials, colours, people and languages”, which drives her to experience life in different settings and to blend scientific analysis with creative intuition .Website Twitter: @lcleries
Location: Cologne, Germany
Over the past 15 years, Cornelia Daheim has led foresight projects for renowned companies and institutions in Germany and internationally. Before founding Future Impacts Consulting , Daheim worked for Z-punkt The Foresight Company , where she developed a new quantification and modelling approach to corporate foresight. In 2003 she founded—and has since chaired—the German Node of the Millennium Project . Daheim also contributes her foresight skills as Vice President of the Foresight Europe Network , as a member of the Scientific Committee for the Futures-Oriented Technology Analysis Conference , and as part of the Association of Professional Futurists’ Professionalization Expert Task Force. Recently, her focus areas have included the future of work, mobility, energy, food, and societal change.Website Twitter: @CorneliaDaheim
Location: Denmark
Futurist, author and speaker Anne-Marie Dahl is the founder and director of Futuria , a service that focuses on “creative and strategic ways to handle the possibilities and challenges of the future”. Dahl gives talks and workshops to public and private organizations across Europe. Some of her presentations have included “The emotion society – the new marketplace”, “The popstars generation (youth culture)” and “The labour market of the future”. Before founding Futuria, Dahl was the futurist and chief consultant at consulting firm NIRAS A/S, and before that position she was the project manager at the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies . Her other experience spans agriculture, politics, economics, psychology, and the social sciences. Dahl’s latest book investigates the younger generation’s dreams and expectations for the future.Website Twitter: @FuturiaDK
Location: Namur, Belgium
Equality between women and men, respect for human rights, and empowering women through digital solidarity are some of the core tenets of Marie-Anne Delahaut’s work. As the Director of Research at the Destrée Institute , and the President, CEO, and Founder of Millennia2015 Women and Innovation Foundation , Delahaut applies foresight research to create fairer and more ethical futures. Millennia2015 is now known as Millennia2025 for its focus on using foresight and information technology to empower more women over the next decade. The theme of women’s full participation in political, economic, and social decisions has been explored at three international conferences arranged by Delahaut’s organizations. In 2012, Delahaut was named one of the “Women Inspiring Europe” by the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE) .Website Twitter: @Millennia2015
Location: Paris and Rennes, France
Cécile Désaunay is the Director of Foresight Studies at Futuribles , an independent organization that surveys and studies the future, publishes insights, and facilitates debates and roundtable discussions. Désaunay specializes in consumer foresight and lifestyle-based foresight, investigating changes in homes, transport, attitudes towards companies and the environment, and much more. She assists businesses and public organizations with scenario planning and analysis. Previously, Désaunay was in charge of the Futuribles journal . Her research has been published in Le Monde and Alternatives économiques .
Website Twitter: @CcilDesaunay
Location: Sweden
Natalie Dian is the owner and director of Visionscentret Framtidsbygget , a consulting firm with substantial experience in futures studies project design. She is also the creator and manager of Foresight Styles Assessment , a certification tool for consultants that identifies the way in which individuals and organizations handle change. Dian contributes to the operations and strategic directions of the World Futures Studies Federation as an Executive Board Member and supports the Small Business Association. Her interests include global megatrends, social innovations, and ecological living. In a values statement on her website , Dian writes, “People are systems that are always trying to come into balance. I gravitate toward people that help me create balance…I am drawn to differences in cultures and similarities in values…I value reflection in a world where doing is dominant and too often without meaning.”Website Twitter: @Fstyles
Location: Paris, France
In the world of fashion and product design, the pronouncements of respected trend forecaster Lidewij “Li” Edelkoort sometimes become self-fulfilling prophecies. Edelkoort uses both research and intuition to peer beyond the myopia of the present and help her clients prepare for the future. As the founder of the consultancies Trend Union and Studio Edelkoort , based in Paris, New York and Tokyo, Edelkoort has worked with high-profile companies from Coca-Cola to Nissan to Gucci. The fashion and design futurist explores future consumer attitudes, lifestyles, and economic trends, as well as fashion specifics such as the next most popular colours and fabrics. She is well known for her biannual General Trend Book Colour Forecast Trend Tablet Website Twitter: @edelkoort
Location: Brussels, Belgium
Kaat Exterbille is the Managing Director and Strategic Foresight Advisor of Kate Thomas & Kleyn , a futures management consultancy. She is also involved in overseeing creative events and festivals held in Brussels, Belgium, and she sits on the Board of Directors for the IWT agency for Innovation by Science and Technology . Exterbille helps to prevent organizations from getting bogged down in their routines and losing sight of critical issues. She leads strategic planning workshops, creative innovation sessions and business process revisions by engaging with the latest research and market insights. In September 2015, Exterbille will be involved with the Future Thinking in High Schools project that will teach students about disruptive thinking and help them to develop innovative ideas for their personal life and environment.LinkedIn
Location: London, UK
Tracey Follows is a professional futurist who specializes in the futures of brands, communications, and media. During her 20 years in marketing and advertising, Follows realized the importance of using her strategic skills to plan for the future. Described by others as a “future-stalker”, a “pattern-breaker”, and “the perfect chief culture officer”, Follows founded futures agency AnyDayNow to help brands and companies organize their futures. She has worked with Google, Telefonica, startups, and agencies and has spoken spoken at, chaired, and judged a variety of events. Follow is a regular futures columnist for Marketing Magazine and a monthly columnist at the Media and Tech Network of The Guardian . She holds a Professional Certificate in Foresight from the University of Houston and she is a member of the Association of Professional Futurists and the World Future Society.Website Twitter: @tracey_lou
Location: Copenhagen, Denmark
Louise Fredbo-Nielsen credits her “inner child” with inspiring her to convey complicated issues about the future in a fun, easy-to-grasp way. Creating visualizations, drawings and games helps Fredbo-Nielsen to communicate “cool educations” in her capacity as futurist at Future Navigator and Associate Professor at Roskilde University. While still in grad school, she won a national prize for a paper on the future of the Danish innovation system. Soon after graduating, Fredbo-Nielsen lived out her innovation theories as an entrepreneur with the company Art District . One of her specializations is creating “body, mind and soul in businesses of the future”. She “would love to plant a seed in young people that the future is so bright and full of possibilities if we focus on making things better today”.Website Twitter: @LouiseFredbo
Location: Copenhagen, Denmark
Tamira Snell analyzes consumer and behavioral mega trends to develop strategy and innovation advice for a variety of industries and sectors. As the Senior Consultant and Futurist at the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies , Snell is an experienced futurist with a people-centric approach. Throughout her career she has worked on topics such as healthcare innovation, public-private innovation models, ethnographic research, and design and lifestyle trends. Snell has also studied and worked in fashion, engaging with the inter-development of socio-cultural tendencies and fashion trends. She has applied her knowledge of cultural sociology and cultural production to roles including Lead Insight Analyst at KPMG, Trend Researcher at Kjaer Global , and Innovation Consultant at Sundhedsinnovation Sjælland (Health Innovation Zealand ).Website Twitter: @TamiraSnell
Location: London, UK
“As a food futurologist, I don’t look into crystal balls and predict that the future is filled with tall, dark handsome waiters but I do get to talk about food in all different contexts and capacities,” writes food futurologist Dr Morgaine Gaye on her website . Gaye is the director of Bellwether Food Trends, a London-based team that produces a bi-annual compendium of food trends. She investigates food by applying modern scientific research to history, nature, geopolitics, cultural theory, branding, marketing, fashion, and consumer behavior. She also helps ad agencies, PR companies and brands to think about the future and to use trends and foresight to revamp their product offerings. This involves giving keynote speeches, public and private seminars, academic research and publications, and journalistic insights all revolving around food. Gaye is also a food entrepreneur who has developed a line of healthy products under the Dr Gaye label , which includes the Super-Porridge, the Super-Blend, the Super-Spoonful, and the Super-Shake. Despite her expertise with food, Gaye isn’t afraid to admit that she is “not the world’s best cook”.Website Twitter: @morgainegaye
Location: Paris, France
Fabienne Goux-Baudiment is passionate about futures education. She has decades of experience in developing and teaching foresight courses, and she was President of the World Futures Studies Federation from 2005 to 2009. Goux-Baudiment also has direct involvement in futures strategy for both the public and private sectors. As the CEO of proGective , she consults widely on topics as diverse as managerial foresight, urban futures, climate change, theory of change, robots, and education. She is also the President of the French Society for Foresight and a key advisor on the future of the Ile de France region. An active speaker and advisor for international conferences and a member of many think tanks, Goux-Baudiment’s insights are widely published. In an article for World Future Review Website Twitter: @proGective
Location: London, UK
Strategist, bestselling author and commentator Noreena Hertz has a background in economics that has helped her to advise some of the biggest organizations and most senior figures in the world. Hertz graduated from university at the age of 19. By the age of 23 she was advising investors on mergers and acquisitions and assisting the Russian government with its economic reforms. At 29 she was working with the governments of Egypt, Jordan, Israel and Palestine on the Middle East Peace Process. Hertz is well known for her forward-thinking books and publications. She warned of the serious and widespread repercussions of unregulated markets and massive financial institutions in her 2003 book The Silent Takeover The Debt Threat Website Twitter: @noreenahertz
Location: Finland
Elina Hiltunen is the founder and CEO of What’s Next Consulting, a firm that focuses on anticipating the future through weak signals. Hiltunen is known for co-inventing the TrendWiki tool for crowdsourcing organizational futures, as well as creating the “Futures Window ” and “Strategic Serendipity ” tools. She has been Chairperson of the Future Infinite Conference and has written a book on how companies are coping with the future , and also a book about the Future of Technology in 2035 . Previously, Hiltunen worked as a futurist at Nokia and Finland Futures Research Centre, and wrote for publications including Blue Wings (Finnair) magazine and Talouselämä business magazine. She is the founder of Tiedettä Tytöille , an initiative to encourage STEM for girls.Website Twitter: @elinafuturist
Location: Athens, Greece
Jennifer Hinton is a sustainability expert and consultant who uses systems thinking to link diverse fields, sectors and stakeholder groups in multicultural and international settings. Hinton is the co-director of the Post Growth Institute , which aims to inspire and support the shift from a growth-based paradigm to a post-growth paradigm—one that changes mindsets and respects cultural values and the natural limits of our planet. She is the co-author of How on Earth: Flourishing in a Not-for-Profit World GrowthBusters: Hooked on Growth Website Twitter: @Hintojen
Location: London, UK and Ahmedabad, India
As the Co-founder and Director of Superflux , Anab Jain envisages “the studio as a new kind of design practice, responsive to the challenges and opportunities of the twenty-first century”. She has led multidisciplinary design, strategy and foresight projects for think-tanks, businesses and research organizations, from Sony to the Qatar Foundation to the BBC. Jain is a TED Fellow and the recipient of awards including the UNESCO Digital Arts Award and the Award of Excellence, ICSID and Apply Computers. As a keynote speaker, Jain has presented to organizations such as MIT Media Lab , the Global Design Forum , and FuturEverything . With an MA in Interaction Design from the Royal College of Art, Jain’s work has been widely exhibited at leading museums and festivals. Previously, Jain held senior positions at Microsoft Research Cambridge, the Helen Hamlyn Centre, and Nokia Design London.Website Twitter: @anabjain
Location: London, UK
Tamar Kasriel is the Founder of Futureal, a London-based strategic agency that uses research, logic and creativity to help clients prepare for the uncertainties of the future. Kasriel worked at the Medialab of The Guardian newspaper back in the early days of the Internet, before leading the Knowledge Venturing team at the Henley Centre consultancy for a decade, and then founding Futureal. Listed by Wired Magazine as one of the world’s top futurists, Kasriel has spoken for many international audiences, including events for The Economist. She has written a book called Futurescaping: Using Business Insight to Plan Your Life an interview for The Next Women business magazine .Website Twitter: @TamarKasriel
Location: London, UK
Nearly 28 years ago, Anne Lise Kjaer founded a futures consultancy, Kjaer Global Ltd , where she applied her knowledge of design and trend forecasting. Gradually, Kjaer Global has developed into an international trend management consultancy focusing on business, management, communication, and innovation strategies for global corporations. Clients of Kjaer’s firm include Ikea, Sony, McKinsey & Co. and Unilever. Kjaer uses “whole brain methodology” to bridge the rational and emotional components of decision-making. Her most recent book, The Trend Management Toolkit – A Practical Guide to the Future Mindful Leadership Symposium in Zurich during May 2015, Kjaer contributed to the discussion on “Enoughism”—imposing reasonable limits on consumption and living patterns. According to Kjaer , the mindful leader of today “will consider how we can achieve a more inclusive economy—one where people, planet and purpose are placed at the center of our moral compass”.Website Twitter: @kjaerglobal
Location: Stockholm, Sweden
Jackie Kothbauer is one of Sweden’s leading speakers on personal branding, social media, and digital content marketing. She is a corporate advisor, media futurist and author with the business name Mediababe , which was the title of her book about building an exciting career, a successful personal brand, and new customers. Kothbauer launched the first web portal in Sweden in 1995, and she was quick to introduce e-commerce to the public sector. Strategy is key to Kothbauer’s work, as is keeping up to date with the latest trends and working with high-profile clients, such as McDonalds, NIKE, PWC, and Women in Film. Kothbauer believes that Kendall Jenner and the Kardashians “are just early adopters” of personal branding, and that the future will see everyone adopt a social media strategy for maximum impact.Website Twitter: @JackieKothbauer
Location: Paris, France and London, UK
Dr. Helene Lavoix is the Founder and Director of the Red (Team) Analysis Society , a think tank focused on security issues, anticipatory intelligence, strategic foresight and warning, and risk management. She previously worked for the Global Futures Forum , the European Commission, and the US Department of Energy. Lavoix also managed an NGO in Cambodia during the early 1990s to contribute to the country’s development and political relations. She holds a PhD in politics, government and international relations, and her thesis topic was nationalism and genocide in Cambodia. Lavoix has published a variety of papers for governments and high profile organizations. She has also taught Strategic Foresight and Warning for university students and executives, and she is included on the list of Soc Sci Academic Tweeters .Website Twitter: @HLavoix
Location: Leeds and London, UK, and Mazarron, Spain
The future of law is the specialty of Chrissie Lightfoot, an “entrepreneur-turned solicitor turned entrepreneur and CEO of EntrepreneurLawyer”. Lightfoot is highly acclaimed for her publications, business models, pioneering and forward-thinking advice. Her writing, speaking and consulting capacities as a futurist on the subjects of “SocialHuman”, AI and robotics in the law, have seen her publish the groundbreaking Naked Lawyer seriesROAR Experience Sales Programme . A prize-winning researcher, Lightfoot writes many articles for both the legal and business press. She has also founded three startups across the sectors of leisure, new media and law. In 2013 she was nominated and honoured as Legal Professional of the Year and a Top 100 International Executive, as published in the International Top 100 Business Magazine. The Times rated Lightfoot as a Top 10 Legal Tweeter and in 2015 she topped LinkedIn’s list of the most engaged and best-connected women in the legal sector.Website Twitter: @entrepreneurlaw
Location: Copenhagen, Denmark
As Managing Partner and Chief of Future Navigator , Liselotte Lyngsø is passionate about building a better tomorrow. She works extensively on scenarios about future consumers, future co-workers, and new technologies. She has spent over 15 years as a keynote speaker in Europe and the United States and has authored many books and articles on working families, storytelling, the quest for originality, and meaningful technology. With her colleague and fellow futurist Anne Skare Nielsen , she co-authored Don’t be a bore, explore! Fahrenheit 212 , an ideas company owned by Saatchi. She was also the Director of Research at the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies for eight years. Lyngsø is a founding member of the Global Future forum .Website Twitter: @LiselotteLyngso
Location: Ipswich and Bath, UK
Dr. Nicola Millard is the Customer Experience Futurologist and head of the customer insight and futures team at BT Technology . Despite working for a technology company, Millard is not a technologist. Instead, she combines psychology with futurology to anticipate the next challenges facing customers and organizations. Millard “likes nothing better than to challenge conventional business thinking”. She has appeared on several television channels and she also judges a number of award panels, including the Institute of Customer Service awards. After writing her PhD on the psychology of motivation and technology acceptance in call centers, Millard published a book on designing motivational user interfaces for call center employees. She spends most of her time working on blogs , articles, and white papers, but this does not stop her from practicing judo, weights, tai chi and karate in her spare time.LinkedIn Twitter: @DocNicola
Location: Newbury, Berkshire, UK
Chief Executive and Director of SAMI Consulting , Gill Ringland, has an impressive career history that has spanned physics, software, information technology, strategy, and future thinking. She has been active in five startups, and was instrumental to building ICL Fujitsu into a £3bn business. Drawing from her strategy work at ICL, Ringland wrote the amazon.com bestseller Scenario Planning Knowledge Insights .Website
Location: Barcelona, Spain
Lucy Esperanza Rojas is a trend consultant passionate about understanding the disruption of new technologies and emerging cultural behaviors. In 2008, she co-founded wabi.sabi lab , a strategic foresight company that specializes in seizing future opportunities in new media and internet culture. In 2014, she co-founded Internet Age Media , an initiative that “cultivates the open ecosystem emerging from the evolution of internet as culture”. Over the past decade, Rojas has explored sectors as diverse as advertising, luxury brands marketing, digital strategy, psychology, and trend research.
Website Twitter: @lucy8688
Location: Mallorca, Spain
Dr. Elisabet Sahtouris is a futurist, evolutionary biologist, professor, author, and consultant on Living Systems Design. She shows the relevance of biological systems to organizational design, with an emphasis on evolutionary trends towards collaboration and global family. By applying the principles of nature to the corporate world, global politics and economics, Sahtouris works to promote sustainable health and wellbeing for humanity within the larger living systems of Earth. She is the Chair of Living Economies at the World Business Academy , an advisor to EthicalMarkets.com , and an affiliate of university programs in sustainable business. Sahtouris has contributed widely to international dialogues, including working as a consultant on indigenous peoples for the United Nations, and participating in the Humanity 3000 dialogues of the Foundation for the Future . She travels across the globe to present speeches and lead workshops. Her latest book is Gaia’s Dance Website Twitter: @sahtouris
Location: Copenhagen, Denmark
Anne Skare Nielsen is one of Scandinavia’s leading futurists. She works at Future Navigator and shares her vision of the future through keynotes, writings, radio shows, and television. Skare Nielsen is a “provocateur” with “a penchant for science fiction movies, deep conversations with visionary leaders, and champagne”. Her aim is to transform journalism, politics, and education for the cause of peace. In September 2015, Skare Nielsen became a News Anchor for NewScience on Denmark’s TV2 News. Like her colleague Liselotte Lyngsø , Skare Nielsen used to work at Fahrenheit 212 and the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies . Her diverse educational background spans biology, political science, and business.Website Twitter: @anneskare
Location: London, UK
Melissa Sterry is a futurist, design scientist and transformational change strategist to industries including construction, utilities, manufacturing, design, publishing, media and communications. A PhD researcher at the Advanced Virtual and Technological Architecture Research (AVATAR) laboratory at the University of Greenwich, she is developing The Bionic City ™: a blueprint for a smart, sustainable metropolis that transfers knowledge from Earth’s ecosystems to create resilience to extreme meteorological and geological events, thereby reducing structural damage and loss of life. “I believe we could evolve a far more harmonious relationship with Earth Systems,” Sterry says in an interview for Urbantimes . Her philosophy centers on the premise that “what humankind considers a force for destruction, nature considers a force for creation”. A regular advisor of sustainability and social enterprise groups, Boards, and non-profits, Sterry has received the Mensa International Award for Benefit to Society. She has been published in over 60 international titles and features in the Global Women Investors and Innovators Network Hall of Fame.Website Twitter: @MelissaSterry
Location: Bulgaria
Dr. Mariana Todorova conducts research in future studies and strategic planning. She is an analyst, futurist, strategist and trend tracker who works at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences as an Assistant Professor. Her PhD combined counterfactual analysis and the influence of the past on the future to develop a new methodology for scenario building. She presented to the World Future Society Forum in 2014 on the influence of construed facts, such as hypotheses, suppositions, rumors, and gossip, on future realities. Todorova is also a Member of Parliament at the National Assembly of the Republic of Bulgaria. She has completed an Executive Program in Political leadership at Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government, and the International Visitors Leadership Program at the US State Department.LinkedIn
Location: The Hague Area, The Netherlands
As the inaugural President of the Dutch Future Society , Dr. Freija van Duijne oversees a large network of professional futurists, trendwatchers and strategy experts. She is a strategic foresight practitioner affiliated with the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs, and also runs her own professional practice, Future Motions . Previously, van Duijne was the foresight studies project leader for the Dutch Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority, and the Netherlands Ministry of Agriculture. Recently, van Duijne prepared a Scenario Based Policy Discussion session for the OECD. She blogs and writes short articles about the future, with her interests ranging from fraud research to intelligence to sustainable development. Van Duijne holds an MA in cognitive psychology from Leiden University, and a PhD in applied ergonomics and design from Delft University of Technology, specializing in risk perception.Website Twitter: @FreijavanDuijne
Location: France
Dr. Angela Wilkinson is Counsellor for Strategic Foresight at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) . Her interests lie in helping groups and organizations to resolve global 21st century problems. She has directed several important public-private initiatives to this effect, including AIDS in Africa: Three Scenarios for the Future, for UNAIDS, and The Future of Water: Navigating a Sustainable Course, for the World Business Council on Sustainable Development. Wilkinson holds over 20 years of experience in consulting, management, analytics and leadership. She previously worked as Director of Scenario Planning and Futures research at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School , as well as spending a decade investigating global scenarios for Royal Dutch Shell. Wilkinson says in a short video for the Dutch Future Society , “…we know that we have a culture of prediction…but what we haven’t got really is a culture of use of foresight among the policymakers…we have to address the cognitive, institutional and other barriers that there are to helping decision makers engage with foresight.”LinkedIn
Location: Sandy, UT, USA
Dr. Maria H. Andersen is the Director of Learning and Innovation at Area9 , where she designs and develops adaptive learning software. She has previously worked as the Learning Futurist of the LIFT Institute, and she continues to work as a learning futurist, author, speaker, blogger and game designer. Her career has also seen her teach mathematics, chemistry and social media, useful backgrounds for learning futurism. “I believe that self-directed learning and engagement are now the most important issues in education. When content begins to teach itself (and it will), instructors will need to be ready to shift into the role of learning coaches,” Andersen writes . A self-described voracious learner, Andersen sees the future of learning as one that will be much more personalized and yet more social, with an emphasis on continuous learning.”Website Twitter: @busynessgirl
Location: New York, NY, USA
Katie Aquino, also known as “Miss Metaverse”, is the owner of the Futurista trademark that sees her legally recognized as “the world’s first FuturistaTM”. Aquino is building on her background in filmmaking to mastermind a diverse mix of future-themed entertainment, consulting and mentoring as the CEO of the new Futurista Agency in New York. Her areas of expertise include technology, fashion, innovation, and the future of feminism, but Aquino shares her fascination for a wide array of future trends by managing The Futurist Daily and Awesome Future TV . A self-described “techno-optimist” and “ultra-visionary”, Aquino doesn’t hesitate to be proactive and provocative in her marketing and social media. She lives and breathes her Miss Metaverse identity, declaring in an interview , “Today, we accept that artists like Lady Gaga and rappers Yeezy, 2 Chainz, and Eminem build empires under their alias’, so why can’t hackers, makers, and futurists?”Website Twitter: @missmetaverse
Location: Toronto, ON, Canada
Science fiction writer, futurist and speaker Madeline Ashby has written narrative scenarios and science fiction prototypes for diverse organizations including the Institute for the Future, Intel Labs, SciFutures, Nesta, and Data & Society. She has published a wide range of future-thinking books, short fiction, essays, and criticism. Her focus is on talking about the future by telling stories. “The first step to changing anything in this life, whether it’s a relationship or a republic, is to imagine that there could be something different. Not better. Not worse. Just different,” Ashby writes on her website . A graduate of the Masters of Design in Strategic Foresight and Innovation program at OCAD University, Ashby wrote her thesis on the future of border security. Other topics she has explored include the future of warfare, the future of gameplay and the future of intelligent systems in relation to smart cities.Website Twitter: @MadelineAshby
Location: San Francisco Bay Area, CA, USA
Miriam Lueck Avery is a research director, foresight practitioner and anthropologist at the Institute for the Future (IFTF) . She writes on her blog , “…while I lament that Robert Textor’s turn of phrase, ‘anticipatory anthropology’ has just too many syllables, I’m very fond of it.” Some of Avery’s recent projects cover the intersection of food and agriculture, health and wellbeing, and sustainability and resilience. She is also interested in topics such as work-life integration, urban issues, retail alternatives, participatory foresight, and youth leadership. Avery presents forecasts in strategic roadmaps, conferences, panel discussions, and keynotes. Part of her role is teaching and training innovators in foresight skills, including by designing group processes that facilitate the anticipation of the future and enable strategic decisions in the present.Website Twitter: @myravery
Location: Toronto, ON, Canada, and San Francisco, CA, USA
Ayelet Baron believes that this century is about living and breathing abundant possibilities. As a futurist, keynote speaker and entrepreneur, Baron investigates how technology, collaboration and co-creation can improve our wellbeing. Her extensive experience in online networking, strategy development, and leadership has seen her climb the corporate ladder and deliver over 300 keynote presentations and workshops. Baron is keen to give back to people and organizations, a mission that has inspired her to write Social Media for Social Good and to co-found Creatingis , a movement to help a new generation of leaders to make a difference in their communities. Baron’s admirable volunteer work includes mentoring youth at a technology center in Nairobi, helping launch the global mHealth Alliance , supporting NGOs at NetHope , and joining the Board of One Heart Worldwide .Website Twitter: @ayeletb
Location: Portland, OR, USA, and Sydney, Australia
A background in anthropology helps future thinker Dr. Genevieve Bell to develop new products and technologies based on people’s evolving needs and desires. Bell is Vice President of the Corporate Strategy Office at Intel, a career role that has seen her develop several patents for consumer electronics. Bell told the New York Times that her mandate at Intel “has always been to bring the stories of everyone outside the building inside the building—and make them count”. She considers herself among the “outsiders”, a position which gives her an edge in understanding how consumers use and perceive technology. Bell is a highly regarded industry expert, speaker and commentator on the intersection of culture and technology. Her accolades include a mention in Fast Company’s “100 Most Creative People in Business” and an induction into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame. Bell has been a mentor for future thinker Danah Boyd and she continues to inspire women in the fields of science and technology.LinkedIn Twitter: @feraldata
Location: New York, NY, USA
Futures thinker Alisha Bhagat is fascinated by complex systems. She has devoted her career to understanding how systems work in order to tackle problems in society. After studying anthropology and a Masters in Foreign Service, Bhagat worked as a research analyst for the US government, engaging with scenario models. Her interest in the future developed during a fellowship in Hawaii’s East-West Center. She went on to co-found the Myanmar Futures Exchange , a summit in Yangon on sustainable economic development attended by leaders in business, government, and non-government organizations. Bhagat now works as Sustainability Advisor at Forum for the Future , where she focuses on creating positive long-term change.Website Twitter: @AlishaBhagat
Location: New York, NY, USA
Francesca Birks is the Americas Foresight + Research + Innovation Leader at Arup Foresight . In this role, she promotes strategic foresight and innovation in the design development process of client projects. Branching out from her strategic planning background in media and advertising, Birks has developed expertise in design strategy. She has recently focused on design and innovation for the built environment, including human-centered design. Birk’s interests also include social sustainability, social media, and social innovation. She brings her understanding of ethnography, storytelling, and strategic planning to her team at Arup, and has helped the company to develop programs on the future of hospitality and the future of education. She is the editor of Arup’s first digital magazine for the Americas, Doggerel Website Twitter: @francescabirks
Location: New York, NY, USA
Futurist, teacher, and entrepreneur Lisa Bodell cherishes the belief that every person has the power to innovate. This premise inspired her to found futurethink , an internationally recognized innovation research and training firm that helps businesses to embrace change. Bodell is known for writing the groundbreaking book Kill the Company and for creating the SIPC Innovation Framework (STRATEGY, IDEAS, PROCESS, CLIMATE), which has become widely adopted by innovators around the world. She writes for prominent publications such as The Futurist, Investor’s Business Daily and Bloomberg Businessweek. Bodell is also a university lecturer and a cognitive learning expert who serves on the Boards of several institutions including The Women’s Congress and the Triple Helix Innovation think tank.Website Twitter: @LisaBodell
Location: Boston, MA, USA
Michele Bowman is the Executive Director of software engineering firm Innovation Foundry and the Curator of 10 Conference, which she calls “an annual fix for idea junkies”. Previously, Bowman founded Global Foresight Associates, a futures research and consulting firm. A member of the first Board of the Association of Professional Futurists and previously its Chairman, Bowman holds a BA in Political Science and a Masters in Futures Studies. Back in 2000, Bowman predicted that in the future, “Cybership will vie for importance with citizenship. Companies will need to increase their tolerance for change, and view boundaries—whether national, corporate, or divisional—as more and more nebulous.”
Website Twitter: @michelebowman
Location: New York, NY, USA
danah boyd is a leading expert on the intersection of technology and society. Her impressive list of accolades includes recognition by Fast Company , Fortune and Foreign Policy for her influence in the technology sphere and her research on youth Internet usage, Big Data, and innovation. boyd discovered the potential of computers while still in high school, and her college undergraduate thesis investigated how the cues in 3D computer systems were “inherently sexist”. She now works at Data & Society , a company she founded and heads, as well as researching for Microsoft and Harvard. boyd is also on the Board of support service Crisis Text Line and was interviewed in the 2015 web documentary about internet privacy, Do Not Track Website Twitter: @zephoria
Location: San Francisco, CA, USA
Nicole-Anne Boyer is a future thinker, strategist, and facilitator of complex change projects across systems and sectors. She founded Adaptive Edge in 2004 to create cutting-edge, collaborative responses to the long-term challenges facing Fortune 100 companies, as well as governments and civil society organizations. “My practice is devoted to improving people’s adaptive capabilities, ingenuity and resilience in a time of flux and transition,” Boyer writes on WorldChanging.com . She attributes her skills in this craft partly to her six years as a scenario practitioner for the Global Business Network think-tank. Boyer’s projects span a wide range of topics, from the future of famine to clean energy to fashion. As a social entrepreneur, she is an active part of the Hub community and helped found its counterpart in Paris. Over the last 15 years, Nicole has worked in over a dozen industries and sectors across the globe. She is also a teacher and a writer who believes that “we need to co-create better stories for our collective future”.Website Twitter: @nabula
Location: Austin, TX, USA
Anne Boysen is the founder of After the Millennials , the first consultant service and blog designated specifically to the next generation. Her interest in this emerging generation—what Boysen calls the “Homelanders”—was conceived from her future-oriented market research for Nestlé, focusing on infant care, child rearing and buying habits in the next five to 25 years. Boysen also works as an Alliance Partner for the Pearson Strategy Group, LLC and a Council Member for consulting firm Gerson Lehrman Group . She is the Vice President of the Central Texas chapter of the World Future Society and holds a Masters in Future Studies from the University of Houston Clear Lake.
Website Twitter: @aftermillennial
Location: Toronto, Canada
As National Innovation Leader at Deloitte Canada, Gayemarie Brown leverages emerging technologies with business models to drive the transformation agenda for Deloitte and its clients. She has over 25 years of experience in keeping pace with change through innovation, corporate strategy, global transformation, and digital technologies. Despite facing “non-believers” throughout her career, such a those who doubt that “innovation leader” is a real job, Brown has become a sought-after speaker on the subject of digital transformation and disruption. In 2008, she founded the DGroup to design strategies and transformation programs to leverage disruptive technologies, focusing on artificial intelligence, robotics, blockchain , and cognitive computing. She has delivered results for Fortune 500 companies and startups, especially in the fields of financial services, software/tech, media and telecommunications.LinkedIn Twitter: @GayemarieBrown
Location: Houston, TX, USA
Sandra Burchsted was one of the first Board members of the Association of Professional Futurists upon its formation in 2002. She holds a Masters in Studies of the Future from the University of Houston Clear Lake and was an Adjunct Instructor in the university’s Studies of the Future program. Burchsted founded strategic consulting firm Prospectiva in 1998 and worked there for nearly 10 years. She also co-founded a future ideas media project, FringeHog , with fellow futurist Michele Bowman . Since then, Burchsted has spoken on topics including emerging trends, social media, and podcasting, and she has volunteered her strategy experience to improve animal welfare.
LinkedIn Twitter: @sburchsted
Location: Detroit, MI, USA
Auto company Ford benefits from the insights of its resident futurist, Sheryl Connelly, who helps the organization to align its priorities, investments and products with the latest industry research. Connelly immerses herself in ever-evolving social, cultural, environmental, technological and economic ideas to imagine what consumers might want in future decades. Her trends research and collaboration within Ford prompted the company to invest in compact utility vehicles during the early 2000s, ahead of many other automakers. From 2005 to 2012, sales of small utilities rose 155%. Connelly’s work also contributed to Ford’s pioneering SYNC® infotainment system , introduced in 2007. Fast Company magazine named Connelly the 24th Most Creative Person in Business in 2013. “It’s thrilling that a more than 100-year-old company, in a very mature and extremely complex industry, is on the cutting-edge of innovation and creativity,” Connelly said of Ford . “It’s about being nimble enough to anticipate or create change.”Website Twitter: @sherylconnelly
Location: Montréal, QC, Canada
Catherine Cosgrove is Chief of Staff at RES PUBLICA Consulting in Montreal. Prior to joining RES PUBLICA Consulting , she spent five years as an independent consultant and futurist, when she investigated sustainable development issues for UNISFÉRA International Centre and co-authored reports for the United Nations. Some of the topics she has researched include the dynamics of global water futures, measures to combat desertification, and integrated financing strategy for sustainable land management. A member of the Québec Bar, Cosgrove holds a law degree from the University of Montréal and a Masters in Strategic Foresight from the University of Houston.
Website Twitter: @catcosgrove
Location: Carmel-by-the-Sea, CA, USA
Sociology and biology have been pivotal to shaping the insights of Rebecca Costa, whose website describes her as “a thought leader and provocative new voice in the mold of Thomas Friedman, Malcolm Gladwell, and Jared Diamond”. Costa explores emerging trends and their relationships with human evolution, global markets, and new technologies. She is one of many futures thinkers whose breakthrough has come with the publication of a groundbreaking book, in her case The Watchman’s Rattle: A Radical New Theory of Collapse The Costa Report Website Twitter: @rebeccacosta
Location: Toronto, ON, Canada
Emily Empel is convinced that “foresight is only effective when it’s matched with delivery methods that create customized, sticky and actionable insights”. To this end, Empel uses immersive foresight methods to help large organizations build their future visions and internal foresight strategies. She co-heads Strategic Foresight at Idea Couture , a global innovation and design firm. Before joining Idea couture, Empel was the resident Workforce Futurist for The Walt Disney Company. She developed fresh ways to deliver insights and reconfigure strategies for business and human capital, including future artifact design, strategy games and immersive theater. Empel has also worked in government and consumer foresight, including the future of emergency management. She holds a Masters in Future Studies from the University of Houston and speaks regularly at events for the World Future Society and the Association of Professional Futurists.Website Twitter: @localrat
Location: Oakland, CA, USA
Tessa Finlev works at the intersection of futures thinking, civic engagement, and social change. According to Finlev, “Participatory foresight should be a regular tool for all social change movements.” As a Research Director of the Ten-Year Forecast for the Institute for the Future (IFTF) , Finlev focuses on “prototyping and implementing new systems-level approaches to building sustainable and equitable livelihoods”. She believes that information technology, immigration patterns, and grassroots campaigning are raising diversity and distributed power to new heights that could promote equitable and sustainable livelihoods. One of Finlev’s major projects is the Peace Lab , an endeavour to facilitate dialogue, discovery and unity through a participatory futures model that empowers communities from within.Website Twitter: @futressa
Location: Kansas City, MO, USA
The buildings of the future will interact with us, adapt and grow, says futurist, architect and urban designer Dr. Cindy Frewen. The integration of architecture with technology is Frewen’s specialty that has seen her merge her own architecture firm with a design firm, write books and consult on the future of cities, and teach Futures Studies at the University of Houston. Frewen is interested in how the roles of architects will change in the future, and how buildings can learn to “talk”, adapt, and shape future experiences. She chairs the Association of Professional Futurists and has served on an impressive range of Boards and committees, including several that promote women’s entrepreneurship. Her contributions to shaping the future of Kansas City are particularly significant, but so is her influence on her peers in the broader architecture industry. Frewen’s diverse architectural and planning projects have received awards for design, sustainability, and community development.Website Twitter: @Urbanverse
Location: San Francisco Bay Area, CA, USA
As a change agent, Katherine Fulton “loves playing with complicated puzzles: seeing the possibilities and then putting the pieces together in new ways, across sectors, disciplines and cultures”. It comes as no surprise, then, that Fulton’s career has been a multifaceted jigsaw, spanning journalism, teaching, entrepreneurship, philanthropy, strategy advising and more. Fulton is currently a Director at Monitor Deloitte and President of Monitor Institute , a part of Deloitte Consulting. She is known for her expertise on the evolution of philanthropy and the rise of impact investing, topics featured in her co-authored books What’s Next for Philanthropy Investing for Social and Environmental Impact Website Twitter: @knfulton
Location: Palo Alto, CA, USA
Eri Gentry is a Research Manager at the Palo Alto think tank the Institute for the Future . A proponent of technology democratization, citizen science, and “hacking medicine”, she is also the co-founder of BioCurious , the first hackerspace for biology. Gentry studies the future of science, technology, behavioral economics, and being human. Her work has been shared by the New York Times, Forbes, Wired, The Atlantic , and in the books Regenesis , Biopunk , and The Nature of the Future Website Twitter: @erigentry
Location: Austin, TX, and Greensboro, NC, USA
Joyce Gioia is a strategic business futurist and the President of The Herman Group of futurists, management consultants and speakers. She has served clients on six continents and she is a Director on the Board of the World Future Society. A founding member of the Association of Professional Futurists , Gioia is also an active Professional Member of the National Speakers Association. Her speciality is relationship aspects of the future, such as workforce and workplace trends, and she prioritizes practical tactics and strategies that her clients can apply right away. With fellow futurist Roger Herman, Gioia has co-authored five books on employment and employees. She has written for publications including The Future magazine, Hotel Business Review , and Delta Airlines’ Sky magazine. Gioia has been listed in Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in the East, and the International Who’s Who of Business Executives. Joyce’s career has covered a wide variety of industries and fields, including wholesale, retail, hard and soft consumer goods, direct marketing, and management consulting.Website Twitter: @JoyceGioia
Location: Austin, TX, USA
Described as endlessly optimistic, Nancy Giordano is a strategic futurist with a drive to help organizations and leaders transform and succeed. With a portfolio of more than $50 billion worth of experience with clients such as Nestlé, The Coca Cola Company, Safeway, Tourism Australia and more, Giordano is passionate about helping leaders update make the right changes to increase their salience and momentum. One of her core beliefs is that big enterprise has the potential to make our lives better. Consequently, Giordano assists leaders to redirect their aims and resources to greater societal benefit, and thereby boost internal company sustainability. As the founder of consultancy firm Play Big Inc. and online ideas platform CulturalAcupuncture.com , Giordano is regularly asked to speak about her insights into the economy and future trends. Giordano was the first TEDx licensee, and she currently leads one of the largest TEDx youth events in the world.Website Twitter: @nancygiordano
Location: Palo Alto, CA, USA
Marina Gorbis is a futurist and social scientist who serves as executive director to the Institute for the Future (IFTF), a Silicon Valley non-profit research and consulting firm. In her 17 years with IFTF, Gorbis has worked with hundreds of organizations in business, education, government, and philanthropy to improve innovation capacity, develop strategies, and design new products and services. Gorbis’s recent research focuses on how social production is changing the face of major industries, a topic detailed in her book, The Nature of the Future: Dispatches from the Socialstructed World interview on the IFTF website , Gorbis says of the “socialstructed world”: “It’s a world of amazing opportunities for individuals to not ask permission, to pursue their passion, and to create amazing things with others.” Gorbis has written for major media such as Fast Company, Harvard Business Review, and BoingBoing.net. A native of Odessa, Ukraine, yet equally at home in Silicon Valley, Europe, India, and Kazakhstan, Marina is well positioned to explore the future from a global viewpoint. She has keynoted international events such as the World Economic Forum, The Next Web Conference, and the World Business Forum.Website Twitter: @mgorbis
Location: New York, NY, USA
Entrepreneur Jan Gordon realized that others shared her overwhelm from information overload when fellow Twitter users were relating to her tweets, needs and interests on this theme. Gordon started to accumulate a large Twitter following and discovered a year or so after joining that she “had become a curator, thriving in a world of ambiguity and disruption”. She decided to continue cultivating a voice that many others would find engaging. This voice has found its expression in Curatti , an online content hub aimed at small to medium sized businesses to keep them informed on trends, strategies, people to watch, cases studies, and more. Curatti’s mission is “to help businesses navigate change by bringing order to chaos through information and direction so they can make better decisions, save time and money and act on this to stay relevant today and in the future”. Before her content curation role as founder and Chief Editor of Curatti, Gordon applied her keen eye for blending cultural trends, the right people, and emergent industries to create new businesses in publishing, television, and the Internet. She remains passionate about helping people to understand and successfully engage in the new digital, social world.Website Twitter: @janlgordon
Location: Houston, TX, USA
Moving “knowing” into “doing” is the passion of Terry Grim, a futurist with an impressive career history in the fields of technology, foresight, strategy, operations, and project management. Grim’s experience includes holding senior positions at IBM, which saw her work on the space program software development team as well as develop skills in Corporate Strategy and international management. After IBM, Grim became a consultant in foresight and strategy with Social Technologies (now Innovaro) and an adjunct professor for the Masters program in Futures Studies at the University of Houston. She is known for authoring the Foresight Maturity Model (FMM) , a results-oriented approach to evaluating an organization’s foresight capacities based on best practices in the field. Grim is the founder of Foresight Alliance , a consulting firm that works with Fortune 500 companies, large businesses and non-profits.Website Twitter: @ForesightAlianz
Location: Redding, CA, USA
Rachel Hatch is a futurist inspired by religion, poetry, and emotional and spiritual wellbeing. One of her favorite poems is “Song of the Open Road” by Walt Whitman, a poem that embraces travelling the road into the future. As a Research Director of the Ten-Year Forecast for the Institute for the Future (IFTF) , Hatch customizes and interprets futures research for clients. Her focus areas include affective technologies and the intersection between new media and religion. Hatch co-founded Woven Capital , a financial planning and investment management firm that offers video call appointments and adopts automation technologies to use “the right mix of humans and machines to get the job done”. She was a co-curator of TEDxRedding for three years. Hatch believes that “champions of change exist within every organization regardless of the sector or industry”. She works to equip future-oriented leaders with the skills and mindsets to “make the future”.Website Twitter: @rachelkeas
Location: New Baltimore, NY, USA
Dr. Barbara Heinzen is a trained geographer with extensive experience in long range scenarios and planning, exploring societies in transition, and integrating ecological principles into everyday life. Her book Feeling for Stones Global Business Network since 1995, and in 2006 she began working on the Barbets’ Duet ecological collaboration initiative in East Africa. Heinzen is also a regular speaker on the challenges of management in a time of systemic transition.
Website
Location: St Augustine, FL, USA
One futurist who has overcome opposition and achieved remarkable results is Hazel Henderson. As one of the pioneers of twentieth century futurism—and still going strong today in her eighties—Henderson committed herself to investigating economic and environmental problems. Her activism to improve air quality in New York during the 1960s successfully fought bureaucratic denial and helped bring about the New York Air Pollution Index. Inspired by the outcome, Henderson embarked upon a journey of self-education in economics. She criticized economic theories for justifying selfish behaviors, environmental destruction, and human suffering from inequalities. Although her ideas were unwelcome to traditional economists, Henderson’s concern for the future gradually gained currency. Since the 1970s, she has advised more than 30 governments on their economic policies. Her columns have been printed in some 400 newspapers in 27 countries. Highlights of Henderson’s research include the case for ethical investing , the causes and characteristics of unpaid labor, and a well-rounded index that measures quality of life. Henderson expects that the special talents of many women as harmonizers and communicators will be vital for a future based on systems and services.Website Twitter: @ethicalmarkets
Location: Ashland, OR, USA
Dr. Jean Houston is a scholar, philosopher, and researcher who uses a trans-disciplinary approach to explore human potential. Her writings and keynote addresses combine history, culture, new science, spirituality and human development to teach others about aligning human capacities with the needs of our time. According to Houston’s website, her lifetime passion is “to encourage the inherent possibilities, visions and capacities that lie within each person and/or group, and translate them into positive action”. Houston has authored over two dozen books, including Myths for the Future (1995), and she assisted Hillary Clinton with the book It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us (1996). Having advised UNICEF on human and cultural development and helped to implement education programs, Houston started the Jean Houston Foundation to build leadership capacities and drive global change.Website Twitter: @JeanHouston
Location: Washington, DC, USA
Since the early 1980s, Jennifer Jarratt has been working on a wide range of futures activities, especially consulting, writing, and keynote speaking. Jarratt was a founding member of the Association of Professional Futurists. Her field of specialization is human resources and social and demographic change, topics which have inspired her to write many books, including The Future at Work and Future Work. Jarratt is the owner of Leading Futurists, LLC . She leads seminars and courses on scenario building, thinking like a futurist, and practical tools for working with the future. Jarratt has been a visiting instructor in Studies of the Future at the University of Houston. She shared in a Pulitzer Prize in her earlier career as a journalist in the United States and Britain.Website Twitter: @jenjarratt
Location: Greater New York City Area, NY, USA
Regina Joseph specializes in the nexus of strategic foresight analysis and information design. An entrepreneur and pioneering digital thought leader, Joseph founded Sibylink , a foresight consultancy based in The Hague and New York City. She also co-founded Super-Powered , a consultancy that trains people to hone their skills to produce robust forecasts and use foresight tools effectively. A faculty member at New York University Center for Global Affairs, Joseph leads NYU’s Futures Lab and has taught forecasting techniques to private sector executives, intelligence analysts, and officials in governments and international organizations including the United Nations and NATO. Prior to launching her own consultancies and becoming a “Superforecaster” for Good Judgment, Inc. , Joseph led the Future Security Foresight initiative at the Clingendael Institute. She has particular experience in envisioning future security conditions and the future of media and technology companies.Website Twitter: @Superforecastr
Location: Brooklyn, NY, USA
Horizon scanning and trend monitoring are crucial to the work of Claudia Juech, Associate Vice President and Managing Director for Strategic Research at The Rockefeller Foundation . A well-known philanthropic organization, the Foundation aims to build “greater resilience and more inclusive economies”. In order to help achieve this mission, Juech applies her skills in idea generation and strategy to assess the impact potential of new opportunities and initiatives. She leads the Foundation’s Strategic Research team and has created a global “Searchlight” network of trend monitoring to boost the idea generation process. Prior to joining The Rockefeller Foundation, Juech was Vice President at DB Research , Deutsche Bank’s think tank for trends in business, society, and financial markets.Website Twitter: @cjjuech
Location: New York, NY, USA
Freelance futurist, trend-spotter and tech commentator Jess Kimball Leslie has led global product engineering projects for companies including American Express, Johnson & Johnson, Samsung, and Spotify. Kimball Leslie writes widely on the future, and has been featured in Wired, The Atlantic, TechCrunch, and several other news sources. Her articles include “Is YouTube the Yahoo of 2015? ” and Sympler: Video Editing, from the Future ”. She was a contributor thanked in Clive Thompson’s 2013 book on the future of digital tools, Smarter Than You Think Apple watch and “Google Glass and other possible tech flops ”.
LinkedIn Twitter: @jesskimball
Location: New York, NY, USA and Isola d’Ischia, Italy
A passion for business, science, culture, design, and technology sees Rita J. King co-direct Science House , a strategic consultancy specializing in the science of organizational culture. She is one of the world’s top experts in collaborative culture, helping organizations to shape business strategies aligned with all components of their ecosystems, from employees and managers to customers and vendors. King is also a futurist at the Science and Entertainment Exchange of the National Academy of Sciences. She is a Salzburg Global fellow and has served as futurist at NASA Langley’s think tank . King’s views on the future have been widely featured in the media, from Fox News to Psychology Today and The Design Observer . Known for coining the concept of the “Imagination Age” , King is also the creator of Mystery Jars and Treasure of the Sirens , containers designed to capture the imagination.Website Twitter: @RitaJKing
Location: San Francisco, CA, USA
Maria Konovalenko’s goal is “to make people live as long and as healthy as possible using the advances of science and technology”. Konovalenko has been fighting aging since 2008, when she joined the team of the Science for Life Extension Foundation , a Moscow-based non-profit. With a background in molecular biophysics, Konovalenko is studying the biology of aging in a joint PhD program between the University of Southern California and the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. She is one of the organizers of the Genetics of Aging and Longevity Conference series . Konovalenko blogs on aging-related topics on her website , such as artificial intelligence, cell therapy, and regenerative medicine.
Website Twitter: @mkonovalenko
Location: Ontario, Canada
International strategy and foresight advisor Iman Kouvalis specializes in sectors that have social and economic impact 15 to 50 years ahead. As CEO of Shaping 2100, she assists private, public and non-profit organizations with growth strategies, business foresight, and building sustainable competitive advantage in disruptive environments. Her clients include the Dubai government, Thomson Reuters, and organizations funded by the Bill Gates Foundation. She holds an MBA with Strategic Planning specialization from Edinburgh Business School, and a degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Windsor, Canada. Prior to working in foresight, Kouvalis was an educator in Canada and an engineer for Ford Motor Company in the United States.Website Twitter: @imankouvalis
Location: San Francisco Bay Area, CA, USA
Liza Lichtinger is a Research Psychologist and endogenous regeneration pioneer who expands recognition of optimal performance through her futurist interventions. She has previously worked in Human Resources for Pfizer and consulted with various companies and individuals apart from her Psychotherapy private practice . Presentations and projects find her speaking to her interests, the importance of safe equanimity and its impact on the nexus of biotechnology and cultural design. Her prior research studies combined immersive techniques to address personality traits and decision making, while studying a Bachelors of Arts in Psychology and Philosophy. Lichtinger holds a Masters in Counseling Psychology, a degree in Labor Law and Human Resources through the Cornell School of Industrial and Labor Relations, and has facilitated Wellness and Strategic Programs at universities, hospitals and recovery centers. When mentoring graduate students she uses gamification models while encouraging students to allow creativity to run the engines of their vital life.Website
Location: San Francisco Bay Area, CA, USA
After training in neuroscience, Dr. Brie Linkenhoker transitioned into strategy consulting with the Global Business Network and Monitor. Linkenhoker learnt how to help governments, companies and non-profits with their decision-making, scenario planning, and game theory-based simulations of the future—skills that she now applies as Director of Worldview Stanford . Linkenhoker founded Worldview Stanford in 2012 with the aim of delivering new knowledge from academia into the hands of the decision-makers who need it most. She is a futures thinker who is also passionate about science, wildlife photography and Giants baseball.
Website Twitter: @blinkenhoker
Location: Austin, TX, USA
The future of healthcare delivery, life sciences innovation, and information technologies are integral to the work of Rachel Maguire, a Research Director at the Institute for the Future (IFTF) . As a principal healthcare researcher for IFTF’s health program, Maguire investigates health finance and the impacts of mobile personal technologies and new media upon health practices. With over 10 years of experience in strategic consulting, long-term forecasting, global research, and quantitative research methods, Maguire is also a public speaker and a facilitator of client workshops. She contributes to the forecasts and annual retreats of the Health Horizons program and serves on the Henry Ford Hospital and the Medical Group National Advisory Council.Website
Location: San Francisco, CA, USA
Jane McGonigal is a future forecaster and a world-renowned designer of games that aim to improve people’s lives and solve real problems. In line with her belief that games can have humanitarian value, McGonigal invented and co-founded SuperBetter , a game that has helped nearly half a million people cope with real-life health challenges such as depression, anxiety, chronic pain, and traumatic brain injury. Other notable games developed by McGonigal include World Without Oil , Find the Future , and Evoke . As Director of Games research & Development at the Institute for the Future , McGonigal investigates how games are transforming our lives and how they can increase wellbeing and resilience. She also speaks to global audiences and conducts workshops for Fortune 500 and Global 500 companies. Fast Company has named McGonigal one of the Top 100 Creative People in Business, Businessweek has called her one of the Top 10 Innovators to Watch, and the Association of Professional Futurists has given her an annual award for Most Important Futures Work.Website Twitter: @avantgame
Location: New York City, NY, USA
Re-thinking, re-imagining, and re-inventing the workplace is the specialty of Jeanne Meister, Partner of consulting firm Future Workplace . Meister is well known for her successful books Corporate Universities, Corporate Quality Universities, and The 2020 Workplace: How Innovative Companies Attract, Develop & Keep Tomorrow’s Employees Today . She is an award-winning future thinker who has been named one of Glassdoor’s top 50 Influencers in Corporate Human Resources and Recruiting . Meister and her firm have launched the 2020 Workplace Network, a consortium of organizations who convene twice a year to discuss, debate and share “next” practices in corporate learning and talent acquisition. Meister’s insights are widely published in leading business media such as Financial Times, HR Executive, and Forbes . She is also a volunteer for Columbia County Land Conservancy and sits on the Board of Directors of the Mahaiwe Center for Performing Arts.Website Twitter: @jcmeister
Location: Silicon Valley, CA, USA and Paris, France
Nilofer Merchant likes to be called “The Jane Bond of Innovation ”. She is a future thinker who specializes in the field of management and has launched more than 100 products, netting $18 billion in sales. During her journey from administrative assistant to division leader to Board member of a NASDAQ-traded company, Merchant has developed leading insights into marketplace and workplace collaboration. Her two books on collaboration have received widespread recognition, as have her keynote presentations and her columns for BusinessWeek and Forbes . Merchant was ranked number 1 Thinker on the Future by the Thinkers50 awards for management in 2013, and made Fast Company’s list of the 25 Smartest Women on Twitter in the same year. She is currently a Fellow at The Martin Prosperity Institute where she is studying society’s emerging power infrastructure, as well as methods to improve social, political and financial systems.Website Twitter: @nilofer
Location: Encinitas, CA, USA
Venessa Miemis is a futurist and “creative muse” who raises awareness about changes in social patterns and cultural paradigms, as well as the impacts of technology and new models of collaboration. “I am scouting the edges of technology and innovation, right where the magic happens,” Miemis writes on her company website and blog, Emergent by Design . Some of her projects include analysing the future of Facebook, the future of money, and keynote speaking on strategic change management. Miemis holds a Master of Arts in Media Studies and a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and has assisted with intensive foresight education programs. She hopes that society is “reaching the tipping point where a critical mass of people on this planet are waking up to our true potential as a globally networked consciousness”.Website Twitter: @VenessaMiemis
Location: Orlando, FL, USA
“Many people consider futurism a bit of a Mickey Mouse profession. Yvette Montero Salvatico isn’t one of them,” writes BOSS deputy editor Patrick Durkin in an article for the Australian Financial Review . Montero Salvatico was the Manager of Future Workforce Insights at The Walt Disney Company before joining the Kedge futures consultancy . She has also worked in finance and speaks for large audiences on topics such as foresight, business policy, talent, work, and diversity. Montero Salvatico believes that exposure to ideas and people from different industries is crucial for gaining a clearer picture of the future. She is critical of many executives’ reliance upon trends-based forecasting, reminding us that “Trends can be our worst enemy because they hold us to what is happening today rather than looking at the underlying causes. Nothing happens in isolation.”Website Twitter: @ymsalvatico
Location: Houston, TX, USA
Alexandra Montgomery Whittington is an Adjunct Professor who teaches Forecasting for Technology Entrepreneurship at the University of Houston. Since graduating with a Master of Science in Studies of the Future from the University of Houston Clear Lake in 2003, she has developed a versatile range of skills as a professional futurist. Whittington has worked in a futurist capacity for non-profit, community organizations, corporate clients, and small futurist consulting groups. She has also been a guest on several radio programs and has been published in The Futurist magazineFutures journalWebsite Twitter: @alexandra4casts
Location: San Francisco, CA, USA
Nancy Murphy is the Director of Experience Design and Communications at Worldview Stanford . She is a writer, strategist, consultant and “network evangelist” who focuses on creating interdisciplinary learning experiences about the future. During her two decades at Global Business Network , Murphy co-created dozens of conferences and learning experiences for executives, edited and promoted multiple books, and helped the organization to grow from a startup to a global brand. For the past few years, Murphy has been mentoring young women from Rwanda in her volunteer work for the Open A Door Foundation .
Website Twitter: @nmurphysf
Location: Charlottesville, VA, USA
Kristin Nauth describes herself as an “infomaniac”. She works at Foresight Alliance , where she uses research and creative analysis to help clients transform threats and opportunities into new value and competitive advantage. During her time as house editor, senior analyst, and program manager at Social Technologies, Nauth wrote or edited briefs, reports, presentations, and scenarios for global 1000 clients including Kellogg’s, Procter & Gamble, Univision, and Shell. Before becoming a futurist, Nauth worked as a business journalist and editor in Washington, DC. Her articles were featured in publications ranging from the Washington Post to Knowledge Management to MacWorld . Nauth belongs to the Association of Professional Futurists , American Independent Writers, and The Foresight Network .Website Twitter: @knauth2015
Location: Washington, DC, USA
International development and social innovation are crucial to the work of futurist speaker and sustainability engineer, Dr. Claire Nelson. “As a trained engineer with artistic leanings, I have combined my love for dreaming with my systems thinking, bent to carve out a niche as a futurist, and social entrepreneur,” Nelson writes. She believes that everyone has the innate capacity to achieve more by mastering change. Nelson’s passion for empowering others has seen her found the Institute of Caribbean Studies , speak widely on human rights, leadership, and racial diversity, and establish the Annual Congressional Forum on US/Caribbean relations. She spent over thirty years at the InterAmerican Development Bank before establishing the Futures Forum “to bring the power of strategic foresight to communities around the world”. Nelson has been named a White House Champion of Change for Connecting the Americas. She serves on the Board of the Institute of Industrial Engineers, Sustainability Division, and the International Editorial Advisory Board for the World Future Society. Nelson’s ideal future would be “a Sustainable Shared Future based on development with identity, empowerment, equality and equity”.LinkedIn Twitter: @DrClaireNelson
Location: New York, NY, USA
Erica Orange is the Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of The Future Hunters , a futurist consulting firm. She evaluates emerging trends and identifies their strategic implications for Fortune 500 companies, trade associations, and public sector clients. Before joining the foresight industry, Orange studied a Bachelor of Arts, Political Science and Psychology, and worked in politics and communications. She is now a keynote speaker and published author who has written on topics such as “Understanding the Human-Machine Interface in a Time of Change”, 4D printing, Millennials, and the emergence of a global “She-conomy” .
Website Twitter: @ErOrange
Location: New York, NY, USA
According to futurist and marketing expert Faith Popcorn, the increasing power of women will make the next decade “The SheCade”. In 2012, Popcorn predicted the “SHE-change”, a new era of female power and influence in our world. She prides herself on being an early identifier of many key trends, from the demand for fresh food to the explosive growth of home delivery, home shopping and home businesses. Faith Popcorn’s BrainReserve consults to Fortune 500 companies such as IBM, American Express, and Campbell’s Soup. Known for her charisma, sharp wits and humour, as well as her spot-on forecasting of consumer patterns, Popcorn has been called “The Trend Oracle” by The New York Times and “The Nostradamus of Marketing” by Fortune Magazine. Her FutureView presentation has been watched by thousands of people across the globe. The author of four books on the future , Popcorn continues to make her mark in the media and the realm of trends and brand repositioning.Website Twitter: @FaithPopcorn
Location: San Francisco, CA, USA
Have you ever heard of a robotic psychiatrist? Dr. Joanne Pransky is the World’s First Robotic Psychiatrist®, a noted expert on human-robot relationships who consults for top robotic and entertainment organizations. Pransky’s career highlights include being the robotics futurist at SciFutures and co-founding and editing the International Journal of Medical Robotics and Computer Assisted Surgery . Inspired by renowned author, futurist and robotics thinker Isaac Asimov, Pransky’s lifelong mission has been “to prepare the world for living and working with robots on a daily basis by humorously discussing these social issues at national and international conferences, and by appearing on numerous television shows and film documentaries with her robot ‘patients’”. Pransky’s enthusiasm for robopsychology has seen her alluded to as “the real life Susan Calvin”, the chief psychologist in Asimov’s Robot series. Pransky’s media appearances and publications have helped to catalyze the surge in robotic activity at Silicon Valley. Her ultimate goal is “to help people understand their emotional, social and psychological responses to robotic technologies, which are bound to proliferate in the coming years, impacting every aspect of their lives”.Website Twitter: @roboshrink
Location: San Francisco, CA, USA
Katherine Prince is the Senior Director of Strategic Foresight at KnowledgeWorks . She speaks and writes about the trends shaping education over the coming decade, helping education stakeholders to challenge their assumptions about how education functions, and actively pursue their visions for the future of learning. Before joining KnowledgeWorks in 2006, Prince supported large-scale changes in working practice at Britain’s Open University, introducing an online portal and an online student feedback system for thousands of tutors across the UK. When she studied her MBA, Prince focused on change and knowledge management, creativity, and innovation. Her 2014 TedxColumbus talk offers a glimpse of her vision for a radically personalized future of learning.Website Twitter: @katprince
Location: Alexandria, VA, USA
As the President of Signature i, LLC , Marsha Rhea helps leaders to discover, plan and perform their signature work in the world. Her specialties include association management, environmental scanning, change management, and innovation. Rhea previously worked as Senior Futurist for the Institute of Alternative Futures . She holds a BA in English and History and a Masters in Public Administration, and she is studying a course on Leading Strategic Innovation in Organizations. Rhea believes that in order to prepare for the future, we need to challenge our assumptions, pay attention to other perspectives, and see change as an opportunity.
Website Twitter: @mlrhea
Location: Seattle, WA, USA
Sara Robinson is an experienced futurist who also describes herself as a “designer, writer, investor, time traveler” and “incorrigible collector of change theories”. With a background in political futures, Robinson’s areas of expertise include the baby boomer generation; millennials; and the intersection of religion, culture and politics. As a writer and journalist, she has contributed her thoughts on the American political and cultural landscape to several publications, including The Huffington Post , OurFuture.org , and AlterNet . Earlier in her career, Robinson spent a decade writing copy for major Silicon Valley companies. She is a member of the Association of Professional Futurists and has been actively involved in panels for the World Future Society . As a frontrunner and mentor, Robinson has inspired many of her fellow futurists to pursue studies and careers in foresight.LinkedIn Twitter: @SaraRobinson
Location: Chicago, IL, USA
“No matter the industry…Make, fix, help others.” This philosophy is embraced by technologist, strategic advisor and entrepreneur Juliana Rotich. Born in Kenya, Rotich moved to America where she studied computer science. After working her way up the corporate ladder in the technology world, Rotich co-founded Ushahidi , an open-source software platform that crowdsources crisis information. The software was first used during the Kenyan presidential election crisis in 2008 and has since assisted with diverse crisis situations in Japan, Chile, Australia, Tanzania, Pakistan and Haiti. Rotich also co-founded Kenyan hardware company BRCK Inc. , which makes a self-powered mobile WiFi router. In 2011, Rotich was named Schwab Foundation Social Entrepreneur of the Year in Africa by the World Economic Forum (WEF). She currently serves as a member of WEF’s Global Agenda Council on Data Driven Development, as well as the advisory councils of Microsoft 4Afrika, Waabeh Ltd and BASF. As a blogger, keynote speaker, and Senior TED Fellow, Rotich is known for her commentary on the loss of native forest and water catchments in Kenya, as well as the future of technology in Africa.Website Twitter: @afromusing
Location: Madison, WI, USA
Rebecca Ryan likes to be known as a “human sparkplug”. She is an engaging futurist, speaker, author, and strategist, with a background in economics and international relations. As the founder and co-owner of Next Generation Consulting , Ryan leads a team that helps leaders “to attract and retain the next generation of creative workers”. She is also the Resident Futurist at the Alliance for Innovation , a Senior Fellow at CEOs for Cities , and an advisor for the Accounting Fly job platform and the OwnForce platform for contractors. Her accolades include being named among Accounting Today’s Top 100 Most Influential People and being awarded Entrepreneur of the Year by the US Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship.Website Twitter: @ngcrebecca
Location: Silvermine, CT and Tucson, AZ, USA
As one of the world’s top trendspotters, Marian Salzman creates successful consumer campaigns and reaches global audiences with her insights on diverse topics, from trends to personal branding to consumer differences. Salzman’s annual trends forecasts attract widespread interest and commentary. She is the CEO of Havas PR North America , an agency which has received awards under her leadership for innovation, digital prowess, media relations and more. Salzman blogs for the Huffington Post, Forbes.com and CNBC, and she has authored or co-authored 16 books . She has appeared on prominent television channels such as CNN, the BBC, and Bloomberg TV. Her accolades include being named in PRWeek’s Power List in 2014 and Business Insider’s 25 Most Powerful People in PR in 2012. Salzman has contributed her PR expertise to major awards and programs, including the future entrepreneurs initiative Venture for America , and the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity .Website Twitter: @mariansalzman
Location: West Hollywood, CA
Futurist, strategist and filmmaker Heather Schlegel, also known as “heathervescent” , is excited by technology’s capacity “to positively impact the lives of billions of people”. Schlegel founded The Purple Tornado company to streamline her speaking and consulting, research, design fictions, and media productions. As the producer of five short films, and the host of the Future of Wearables Podcast , Schlegel enjoys the creative side of futures work. She is also a keen social scientist who has helped to launch more than 50 Internet products at over 30 startups in Silicon valley and Los Angeles. As a graduate student in 2013, Schlegel was awarded 1st place by the Association of Professional Futurists for her work on “The Human Problem”. Schlegel is now best known for her research on the Future of Money and Transactions.Website Twitter: @heathervescent
Location: Oxford, UK, and USA
Dr. Wendy Schultz has over thirty years of experience in foresight research, planning, and facilitation. She holds an MA and PhD in Alternative Futures from the University of Hawaii and has directed her own foresight business, Infinite Futures , for over 27 years. Her broad range of projects includes environmental futures, food futures, nanotechnology, transhumanism, and the future of philanthropy. She currently holds an impressive number of positions, including Principal of SAMI Consulting , Senior Fellow at the Center for Postnormal Policy and Futures Studies , and Emergentista and Specialist in Gear Change at LASA Development U.K.
Website Twitter: @wendyinfutures
Location: Minneapolis, MN, USA
An unorthodox background in medicine and dance has helped Cecily Sommers to bring fresh insights into the world of futures. For the past 17 years, Sommers has been speaking and consulting on strategic foresight and innovation, especially positive topics like the art of reinvention and finding new industry opportunities. In the year 2000 she founded the Push Institute , a non-profit think tank that tracks significant global trends and their implications over the next five to fifty years. Sommers made a career breakthrough with the publication of her book Think Like a Futurist: Know what changes, what doesn’t, and what’s next Website Twitter: @cecilysommers
Location: Toronto, ON, Canada
Professor Suzanne Stein is a foresight analyst, educator, and mentor. She currently holds three main positions: Associate Professor, Strategic Foresight & Innovation at OCAD University ; Workshop Leader at the Institute Without Boundaries ; and Lead Mentor at IdeaBoost, Canadian Film Center . Stein’s focus is the domain of new technologies and its relationships with business strategy, organizational change, and experience design. She is a leader in foresight and ethnographic techniques who is “on the prowl for more mechanisms for positive change”. At OCAD, Stein works on the Digital Futures Initiative. One of her key projects has been “The Future of Carbon Information about Consumer Products”, which applied the foresight process known as the “Cone of Plausibility” to create scenarios for product carbon life-cycles. Other project highlights have included the DesignJam service for young startups and aspiring entrepreneurs, and OCAD’s Advanced Digital Training initiative.Website Twitter: @Suzzle
Location: CA, USA
Melanie Swan is “passionate about innovation and technologies with extensive world-changing power”. In September 2014, she founded the Institute for Blockchain Studies, and in 2010 she founded DIYgenomics to make personal genome information useful through crowdsourced clinical trials. Swan’s career has spanned philosophy, research, finance, and entrepreneurship, including founding a technology startup company, GroupPurchase. She served as Director of Research at Telecoms Consultancy Ovum RHK , and previously held management and finance positions at iPass in Silicon Valley, JPMorgan in New York, Fidelity in Boston, and Arthur Andersen in Los Angeles. Swan has advised many organizations and government agencies, and she is an active promoter of science, technology, and opportunities for women. She contributes to the nonprofit space as a member of several Boards, and she also volunteers her blockchain knowledge to help Bitcredit.io develop blockchain-based credit bureaus in emerging markets countries.Website Twitter: @LaBlogga
Location: West Coast, USA
A dynamic social researcher, cultural narrator, future trend hunter and strategic designer, Jody Turner works and speaks globally via her company CultureofFuture.com . Turner’s clients have included Apple, BMW, StyleVision France, and Unilever Istanbul. Her keynote speaking engagements have seen her travel to places as diverse as Ghana, Finland, Brazil and Italy to talk about entrepreneurship, human branding, new media, emotional design, and more. Turner’s specialty is “Business Innovation Insight—Future Brand Anthropology”, a field that has seen her investigate Digital Natives and blog for publications including Fast Company and Stanford Social Innovation Review . Empowering women and girls is important to Turner, and she has worked on the Nike Foundation Girl Effect , the Forbes Girl Quake project , and the Empowerment Plan to help homeless women and disaster relief efforts.Website Twitter: @CultureofFuture
Location: New York City, NY, USA
Kathi Vian has extensive experience in applying new methodologies and frameworks to cutting-edge issues in technology and society. For over a decade, Vian led the Ten-Year Forecast Program at the Institute for the Future (IFTF). She is now a Distinguished Fellow at IFTF , where she examines the future through three intersecting lenses: the innovators in open economies, the evolution of smart networking and social media, and the extreme environments in which human communities will evolve in the next 100 years. Vian’s research centers on the urgent futures that will challenge us in the coming decade. She is particularly interested in the tools and social innovations that will reshape responses to issues such as stark global inequalities, an uncertain climate, changes in the nature of work, and redefinitions of human biology.Website Twitter: @kathivian
Location: Toronto, ON, Canada
Carmen Villadar is a digital strategist, futurist, and startup advocate who enjoys blogging and helping others to innovate. She works as Digital Communications Manager for health research company Phenomenome Discoveries Inc. and Digital Relations Activist for Big Data firm ExB Group . She also works with BrandPR to help brands “build people relationships” and “find their human side”. For Villadar, PR stands for Personal Relevance. She asks herself why someone would want to personally connect with a brand and what aspects of a brand they would find personally relevant to them. Villadar credits her earlier career as a nurse with honing her skills in strategy, negotiating and empathy. Nonetheless, her drive to “cultivate game changers” means that she has turned down “clients that still have their heads operating inside their industry’s box”.Website Twitter: @digitalfemme
Location: Bethesda, MD, USA
Writing, editing, communications, and journalism are crucial skills that helped Cynthia Wagner to find a foothold in the futures industry. Wagner started her career at the World Future Society in 1981 as an editorial assistant for The Futurist magazineOutlook Top 10 Forecast videos on YouTube , and she has edited videos and photos from futures conferences. She is currently Senior Editor of Scrap , the magazine of the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, and a Consulting Editor for AAI Foresight .LinkedIn Twitter: @CynWag1
Location: Baltimore, MD, USA
Digital media futurist Amy Webb founded the aptly named Webbmedia Group , a digital strategy consulting firm that researches near-future trends in digital media and emerging technology. Forbes named Webb one of the “Women Changing the World” due to her many publications and her influence on university education, the arts and the sciences. She is a Visiting Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and a regular contributor on the future of technology, lifestyles, Big Data, and business for Inc. Magazine and Slate Magazine . Webb has co-founded Knowledgewebb Training to teach high-profile clients about digital media, and Spark Camp to gather together thought leaders from diverse industries. In 2013, Webb published Data, A Love Story Website Twitter: @webbmedia
Location: New York, NY, USA
Back in 1970, Edie Weiner joined the Institute of Life Insurance in New York City, at a time of massive change in the insurance industry due to the tumultuous events of the 1960s. She worked on the Trend Analysis Program under the leadership of Arnold Brown , who recognized her “amazing gift for futurism”. In 1977, Weiner, Brown, and Hal Edrich decided to start their own consulting firm to help organizations with horizon scanning, a field which was gaining increasing acceptance. As well as helping to pioneer trend analysis, Weiner has been widely published and has co-authored four books with Brown. Her latest book, FutureThink Website Twitter: @WEBfuturetrends
Location: Washington, DC, USA
Dr. Amy Zalman is the current CEO and President of the World Future Society , the world’s first and largest membership organization for futurists, foresight, and advocacy on future-critical issues. Zalman has worked in sectors as diverse as national security, communications, and business development in science and technology. She is the founder and Principal of Strategic Narrative , a consultancy that helps governments and the private sector use insights from storytelling to guide strategy and communications. Zalman’s interest in narratives harks back to her undergraduate studies in English literature and poetry. She also holds a PhD in Middle Eastern Studies from New York University and is proficient in Arabic and Hebrew. Zalman’s articles have been widely published, and include titles such as “The Global War on Terror: A Narrative in Need of a Rewrite” and “How Power Really Works in the 21st Century: Beyond Soft, Hard and Smart”. She is on the Board of Directors of the Council for Emerging National Security Affairs (CENSA) and she has spoken for high-profile organizations such as US Congress, NATO and the EastWest Institute Worldwide Security Conference.Website Twitter: @StratNarrative
Location: Saõ Paulo, Brazil
Rosa Alegría is a futures consultant and facilitator of innovation and change who is passionate about making a difference. She is the director of the Brazilian node of the Millennium Project , which has seen her contribute to the Women Foresight Study white paper. Alegría is an advocate for women’s rights, economic empowerment, and responsible media, which has seen her co-found the Media for Peace movement. Her interests range from the future of consumerism to new frontiers of economic development. She represents Latin America in the IFG International Foresight Group based in Germany and is the Latin American research associate of the Kairos Institute based in Sweden. As a contributing author for Latinoamérica 2030: Estudio Delphi y Escenarios , Alegría has significant expertise in scenario planning. Her extensive career has seen her work as a Research Director and Co-Chair for the Center of Future Studies at Saõ Paulo Catholic University. Alegría is the Executive Director of Mercado Etico, the Brazilian Version of Ethical Markets , which is a multimedia platform on sustainability and corporate social responsibility created by futurist Hazel Henderson .LinkedIn Twitter: @rosaalegria
Location: Mexico City, Mexico
Dr. Guillermina Baena Paz is a future-oriented professor who has published over 40 books and co-authored another 25. She has participated in diverse international events on the future and worked at educational institutions since 1968, including Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), the largest university in Latin America. Baena Paz has coordinated Prospective Studies at UNAM, and edited the e-magazine Prospective Constructing Futures, and the Working Papers Series in Political Prospective. She is a member of professional associations such as the World Future Society and the Executive Board of the World Futures Studies Federation (WFSF), where she founded the Ibero-American chapter and has been its General Secretary since its creation. Baena Paz is also the WFSF’s Vice-President, Latin America .Website
Location: Saõ Paulo, Brazil
Claudia (Lala) Deheinzelin is a futurist who specializes in the Creative Economy and sustainable development. She coordinates the international movement Crie Futuros Crie Futuros maintains that “the future is the fruit of the dreams of the past and the choices of the present”. Deheinzelin also coordinates Brazil’s first postgraduate program on the Creative and Collaborative Economy, as well as the CoLabs 4D initiative in Brazil, Argentina and Colombia. She is the Director of the international cooperative Instituto Pensarte , and has been involved in the future studies council of Núcleo de Estudos do Futuro for the UN Millennium Project. The P2P Foundation has named Deheinzelin as one of 100 Women Co-Creating a Collaborative Society, in the category of Pioneers and Defenders of Ethics in Business and Economics. Website Twitter: @laladeheinzelin
Suggest other female futurists for inclusion
