John M. Smart, President, ASF

John Smart is a foresight speaker, consultant, and scholar of global processes of technology, business, and societal change. He founded and directs the Acceleration Studies Foundation (Ann Arbor, MI) an organization working to improve leadership's understanding and management of accelerating technological change. He is also founder of Foresight University, an organization improving professional foresight training and careers.

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Before launching ASF John spent nine years as an educational and software entrepreneur, co-founding and building Hyperlearning, an educational services company sold to The Princeton Review in 1996. He is a lecturer on leadership and technological change at the Naval Postgraduate School (Monterey, CA), an advisor in foresight and forecasting at Singularity University (Mountain View, CA), and a technical advisor to NextIT (Spokane, WA), a leader in intelligent virtual assistant (IVA) platforms. John has authored several next-gen IT foresight studies, including the Metaverse Roadmap, the Conversational Interface, Open Internet TV, and AccelerationWatch, perhaps first website to analyze accelerating change from a universal perspective. His new book, Introduction to Foresight, was published on Amazon Nov 2023.

John is co-founder of the Evo-Devo Universe complex adaptive systems research community, an international group of scholars researching evolutionary and developmental processes of change, and a member of the ECCO research group at VUB (Brussels, Belgium). He has a BS in business administration from UC Berkeley, an MS-equivalency in physiology and medicine (two years of medical school and the USMLE-I) from UC San Diego School of Medicine, an MS in futures studies from the University of Houston, and has done postbaccalaureate studies in biological, cognitive, computer, and physical sciences at UC San Diego, UCLA, and UC Berkeley. He studied systems theory at UCSD under James Grier Miller (Living Systems, 1978), who mentored under process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. Dr. Miller encouraged John to pursue multi-scale studies in technological, economic, and social change from a comparative systems perspective.

John's research interests include:

Analysis of accelerating technological, economic and social change
Technology forecasting and learning / experience / performance curves
Technology strategy, planning, roadmapping, and requirements analysis
Technology foresight, trends, scenarios, Delphi and expert polls
Technology innovation, diffusion, assessment, and policy studies
Entrepreneurship and new product and service development
Horizon scanning, competitive intelligence, weak signals/emerging issues
Information technology foresight, computational and process automation
Resource (space, time, energy, and matter) efficiency and density studies
Evolutionary and developmental systems analysis and foresight
Social and technological immune systems, security, and threat analysis

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