LECTURE:
18th OCTOBER 2010

Shaping a sustainable future with the aid of history

Thestudy of technological revolutions reveals significant regularities in their patterns of diffusion. Among them is the shift in consumption patterns that tends to occur in the second half of each great surge of new technologies, after a major financial collapse. The information revolution is just at such a juncture and the environmental challenges, together with globalization, are about to shape the future in ways that might still seem unlikely and as much as synthetics and suburbanization transformed the post-war world.

Prof. Carlota Perez
Author of Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: the Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages
[Elgar 2002; translated into Spanish, Korean and Chinese,]

www.carlotaperez.org
Researcher, lecturer and international consultant, specialised in the social and economic impact of major technical change for growth, development and competitiveness.

She is visiting Research Associate at the Centre for Financial Analysis and Policy (CFAP), Judge Business School, Cambridge University, U.K., Professor of Technology and Development at the Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia, and Honorary Fellow at SPRU (Science and Technology Policy Research) University of Sussex, UK

Her articles from the early 1980s and, in particular, her bookTechnological Revolutions and Financial Capital: the Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages [Elgar 2002] have contributed to the present understanding of the relationship between technical and institutional change, between finance and technological diffusion and between technology and economic development. Her historical work on technological revolutions is recognized as a powerful lens for identifying future trends. She is regularly invited to give lectures at European and Latin American universities

In her country of origin, Venezuela, she was director of Technological Development in the Ministry of Industry in Venezuela and created the first venture capital fund in the 1980s.

She is alecturer and consultant on technical change and strategy for global corporations (IBM, Cisco, Ericsson, etc.) and for governments in various parts of the world. She has worked for several public and private organisations as well as for the European Union, the OECD, the World Bank, the Inter-American development Bank, UNIDO and many other international agencies. She is frequently invited as keynote speaker for major academic, government and business events.