About
I'm Jim Carroll — a futurist, keynote speaker and author. For more than 30 years, I've had one job: to study where the world is heading, and help the people who run organizations get there first.
I've delivered more than 2,000 keynotes to over two million people in 60+ countries — for CEOs, boards and leadership teams at organizations including NASA, The Walt Disney Company, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, The World Bank, Mercedes-Benz and the PGA of America. BusinessWeek named me one of four leading global sources of insight on innovation and creativity, and I was a featured expert on CNBC's primetime series The Business of Innovation.
But the track record I'm proudest of isn't the client list. It's the calls.
In 2000, I co-wrote a book predicting that the future of computing would come down to light. In 2006, I told 3,000 engineers we'd one day run chips and routers on photons instead of electrons. They laughed. Today, NVIDIA is shipping it. I've made calls like that — on telematics, wearables, real-time risk, the acceleration of AI — for three decades, often years before they became obvious.
That's not luck. It's method. Every keynote I deliver is built from a specific industry outward, on 25 to 50+ hours of fresh, original research — never a generic trends talk with a new logo dropped on the opening slide. I'm the futurist who knows your industry.
I'm Canadian, based in Guelph, Ontario. (And no — I'm not the poet.)
How Innovation Happens is thirty years of pattern recognition distilled into 101 lessons on how innovation really works — and how it quietly dies. One at a time, through 2027.