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

My formation was in the 1960s and early 1970s, before the end of the Vietnam War. Inspired by the Space Race, I wanted to be an astronaut – so I decided to read physics at university. I went to Sussex, where I followed my degree with an MA at the Science Policy Research Unit.

After that I pursued journalism, before going on to coordinate postgraduate studies at what is now London’s University of the Arts. For more than 20 years since that time, I’ve consulted for major corporations and for government.

A St Paul’s School scholar and physics graduate, he has a knack of registering trends before other people, and offering counter-intuitive proposals on what to do about those trends. The only things James does not forecast are the weather, the stock market, the horses and your own personal destiny.

James

• helped install and test Britain’s first computer-controlled car park, 1968
• wrote about chemical Weapons of Mass Destruction,The Economist, 1978
• identified the user interface as the key issue in the design of IT, 1981
• wrote an instruction manual for word processing on a portable Commodore 64, 1983
• anticipated by two years the Piper Alpha North Sea oil disaster, The Economist, 1986
• led an international multi-client study of consumer e-commerce, 1988
• advised a top US telecommunications operator to deliver the Web over TV, 1993
• reorganised worldwide market intelligence at Philips Consumer Electronics, 1995-7
• issued a devastating critique of America’s dot.com boom, 1999
• forecast today’s obsession with work-life balance, 2000
• upheld 3G mobile communications in the face of massive doubts, The Guardian, 2002
• highlighted the worldwide boom in gambling games,Cultural Trends, 2003
• influenced UK government policy in favour of the mass production of housing, 2004.

James has been published in German, Danish, Spanish, Japanese and Chinese. About the future, he has consulted or given keynote speeches for 50 of the world's top corporations.

The first job James had was as editor of Design magazine, a glossy colour monthly. In the late 1980s he was head of research at the international designers Fitch.

In the early and mid 1990s, James led consulting in IT at the Henley Centre, part of the WPP Group. There he also advised major UK cities – London, Birmingham, Glasgow and Manchester – on international competitiveness. He then went on to manage worldwide market intelligence for Philips consumer electronics in the Netherlands, and to work as a director of the product designers Seymour Powell. He went independent in 2001.

James helps clients to master new trends in society and innovation, so as to implement major shifts in corporate strategy, marketing, branding and design. He frequently broadcasts about the future of the workplace on Radio 4’sYou and Yours, and writes a regular column for IT Week(London) and Novo (Frankfurt). He is also on the editorial boards of New Design and the Journal of Consumer Behaviour.