James Woudhuysen

Why organisations work with James Woudhuysen

• He treats forecasting as a discipline, not a performance. His work is built on decades of market intelligence at Philips and Seymour Powell, which gives his calls on technology and consumer behaviour a base of operating evidence rather than commentary.
• He argues against received wisdom on energy, climate and innovation in print, repeatedly. For boards reviewing capital allocation in those areas, that contrarian record is the value, not a stylistic feature.
• He covers innovation across energy, IT, construction, transport and the office in a single frame. That breadth lets him explain why an emerging technology will or will not change a sector, drawing on adjacent precedents most specialists miss.
• He writes and lectures with named sources and statistics, not slogans. The work is closer to a serious editorial brief than to a futures keynote, and it stands up to scrutiny in a room of operators.

Biography highlights

• Visiting Professor of Forecasting and Innovation, London South Bank University
• Co-author, Energise! A Future for Energy Innovation (Beautiful Books, 2009) with Joe Kaplinsky
• Co-author, Why is Construction so Backward? (Wiley-Academy, 2004) with Ian Abley
• Co-author, Big Potatoes: The London Manifesto for Innovation (Shanghai Jiao Tong University Press, 2012)
• Former Chief of Worldwide Market Intelligence, Philips Consumer Electronics; former Director, Seymour Powell
• Editor of Design magazine (1979 to 1982); co-founder of Blueprint; contributor to The Economist, The Times, The Independent, The Guardian and spiked

Biography

Most forecasts about technology repeat the dominant narrative back to the buyer. The harder, more useful question is which parts of the consensus are wrong, and where the capital and political assumptions behind it are about to break. That has been the working question across four decades of Woudhuysen’s career, from physics at Sussex to running worldwide market intelligence at Philips Consumer Electronics in the Netherlands.

His chair at London South Bank University is in Forecasting and Innovation, and the topics he writes on cover energy systems, construction, IT, infrastructure and consumer technology in a single frame. Energise! A Future for Energy Innovation, co-authored with Joe Kaplinsky in 2009, argued that the response to climate change should be heavy investment in supply-side energy technology, not moralising about consumption. The argument set the template for his later commentary in spiked, The Economist and The Times.

The corporate record matters because it grounds the work. Three years as Chief of Worldwide Market Intelligence at Philips, four years as a director at Seymour Powell, decades of consulting reports for clients including Amadeus, Brother UK and UK Trade and Investment. He edited Design magazine in the early 1980s and co-founded Blueprint. That combination of operating intelligence and sustained published commentary is what makes the forecasting calls credible.

His co-authored manifesto Big Potatoes: The London Manifesto for Innovation was published in 2010 and republished by Shanghai Jiao Tong University Press in 2012, and his earlier book Why is Construction so Backward? remains a reference point in the industry’s productivity debate. The through-line across the work is a defence of ambitious innovation against what he sees as the cultural reasons organisations and governments hesitate to pursue it.

Key speaking topics

• The future of energy and the limits of net zero policy
• Forecasting technology and consumer behaviour
• Innovation in construction, infrastructure and transport
• The economics and politics of climate policy
• The future of work and the office
• Globalisation, China and the geography of R&D
• Market intelligence and competitive foresight

Ideal for

• Boards and executive committees reviewing long-range capital allocation in energy, infrastructure or industrial technology
• Chief Strategy Officers and innovation leads briefing on technology cycles and emerging markets
• Senior teams in construction, manufacturing and consumer technology rethinking their productivity assumptions
• Investor and analyst forums looking for a contrarian read on energy transition and innovation policy

Audience outcomes

• A clearer sense of which technology and energy forecasts the audience should trust and which it should challenge
• A working framework for telling structural change from cyclical noise across sectors
• A concrete account of why innovation slows in mature sectors and what unblocks it
• Named arguments and data the audience can take into their own strategy and capital decisions