Nicole Anne Boyer

strategist, foresight specialist

and facilitator

Nicole is a strategist, foresight specialist, and facilitator with a passion for creating “better futures.” For 12 years, she has been on the forefront of foresight, futures thinking and innovation, and is now managing director of Adaptive Edge LLC in San Francisco, CA. Nicole has worked in over a dozen industries and sectors around the world. Her client sare leaders from Fortune 100 companies, governments, and civil society organizations. She learned her unique tradecraft at Global Business Network (GBN), a pioneering think-tank in San Francisco. At GBN, she was blessed with world-class mentors—many founders of the field— and has access to an important “brain trust” and network of thinkers and doers. As part of her better futures work, Nicole is also a teacher, writer, and social entrepreneur. Some affiliations include: * Contributor to the book “Worldchanging: A User’s Guide to the 21st Century”, and the award-winning blog by the same name. * Faculty member of Executive Learning Partners, an executive development network based in Amsterdam and Brussels; and was a program director at CEDEP at INSEAD, a leading business school outside of Paris while living in France . * Cofounder of La Ruche, a center for social entrepreneurs in Paris, France. * Steward for The World Café , a popular dialogue process for collective sense-making. * Associate of One Earth, a research and advocacy organization in Vancouver, BC. With a diverse career thus far, Nicole was in venture capital in Singapore in the mid-1990s financing digital infrastructure. Before that she was a pollster, market researcher, and political speechwriter. Nicole earned a B.A and M.A. in political science (with honours) from the University of British Columbia; her graduate work focused on technology policy—i.e. topics like information privacy to why Silicon Valley emerged the way it did. A global nomad for the past 15 years, Nicole has lived in Singapore, Paris, and San Francisco. Most formatively, she grew up in Woodlands on Indian Arm, a coastal community outside of Vancouver, BC. Nicole's hobbies include: sailing (raced for Canada's national sailing team), hiking, reading, writing, slow food cooking with her husband and friends, and hosting salon conversations.