Robert Jacobson
Tucson, Arizona, USA, Earth
ROBERT JACOBSON, a Californian, is an innovation management consultant and strategic planner with a focus on sustainability, futures planning, and the experience of natural and designed environments. He practices on the American West Coast and in the Southwest; and in Scandinavia, in the "Oresund Region" comprising Malmö and Region Skåne in Sweden, and Greater Copenhagen in Denmark. These are his second homes.
His telephone in Sweden is 46 (0)40 692 8484 (calls to USA at no charge).
Bob earned his PhD at UCLA's Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Planning, studying open approaches to information policymaking; an MA in Communications Industry Management from the USC Annenberg School of Communications; and an MA in TV Studies at UCLA, shooting some of the first grassroots documentaries produced using portable video cameras.
As a Fulbright Scholar, Bob organized a three-university study of early cellular telephony deployed in the Nordic Arctic Circle. Its purpose was to highlight how the new communications technology strengthened transborder allegiances among the northern peoples in Norway, Sweden, and Finland (and incidentally, the Soviet Union).
Bob has been online since the days of the ARPANET. While the California Legislature's principal telecommunications and information policy analyst, he coined the term "electronic commerce" to describe emerging markets online. He has twice been a high-tech startup CEO, the co-founder and director of a virtual-worlds research lab, Resident Futurist at SRI, and an advertising creative director with Hal Lawrence, Inc., Marsteller Inc., and other California ad agencies.
Bob has authored numerous articles and three books: Municipal Control of Cable Communications (Praeger 1977); An "Open Approach" to Information Policymaking (Ablex 1989); and Information Design (MIT Press 2000), an anthology. He's now working on two new books, an essay on innovating under pressure and an examination of current challenges to American public diplomacy. As a speaker, he's addressed audiences including the Royal Society in London and the most prestigious technology laboratory in Tokyo. But the most memorable was a videoconference on experience design with faculty and students in Curitiba, Brazil!
