James Harkin

Irish technology speaker, author and trend analyst James Harkin is a leading forecaster of new ideas and new social, political and technological movements, predicting their impact on corporate business, government policy and national institutions. Director of Flockwatching, a company that employs information gathered from blogs, social media networks and the internet to create an understanding and outcome of social changes, new media and consumer trends in mass observation, James Harkin is an engaging and current business speaker.

Prior to becoming a technology speaker James spent a number of years working as a futurologist for think-tanks and consultant agencies across the globe; spending time at some of the most important and influential companies in New York, London and continental Europe James Harkin has made a name for himself as a profound and reliable business speaker and trend spotter. Early on in his career James authored a number of pamphlets analysing the structure and future of British cultural trends, more recently James has gone on to contribute to several notable newspapers and magazines as a technology speaker, journalist and commentator. He has appeared on the BBC, CNN, Channel 4, Sky and Al Jazeera as well as writing for The Financial Times.

Harkin has worked as a business speaker and has lectured on topics of political economy and social theory at Oxford University, and the consequences of the internet at the London School of Economics. James has also moderated live studio debates on two continents for Al Jazeera television. Above all else James Harkin is known for his innovative ideas, he has published several books, including Niche: Why the Market No Longer Favours the Mainstream and Big Ideas: The Essential Guide to the Latest Thinking, and was an integral member of the team behind the ground-breaking BBC documentary series The Trap: Whatever Happened to Our Dream of Freedom?

As well as working as associate producer of the BBC’s three-part series All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, which looked at the relationship between cybernetics, ecology and culture and aired on BBC TV in 2011. Beyond his work as a technology speaker James Harkin is also known as one of the few journalists to provide coverage from inside the devastated city of city of Homs in Syria, where he provided some of the few reports that were able to make it out of the city, these reports were the headline stories for Newsweek Magazine and also appeared on the BBC and CNN. As an academic technology speaker James has presented at some of the most prestigious institutes in the world, he is a visiting fellow at the Reuters Institute at Oxford University and Senior Associate Member of St. Anthony’s College, Oxford University, for the academic year 2013/2014.