Joseph Voros

Dr Joseph Voros holds a PhD in theoretical physics (on mathematical extensions to the General Theory of Relativity). He then spent several years in internet-related firms, including a stint at the legendary Silicon Valley company Netscape Communications in the latter 1990s, and has been a professional futurist for 25 years.

Dr Voros started at Swinburne in early 2000 as a consultant on a special project in the former Australian Foresight Institute. He was then appointed as a strategic foresight analyst in the top-level strategic planning unit at Swinburne, in which role he was involved in the building of an organisational strategic thinking capacity based on foresight concepts and methodologies. During this time, he formed very strong links with the strategic foresight teaching program, attending every subject and providing a practitioner's perspective in regular invited lectures.

In 2003, he joined the academic staff of the Master of Strategic Foresight program, researching and lecturing on the theory and practice of foresight in organisations and society. Three articles from his Generic Foresight Process framework series have won research excellence awards, including the 2010 Outstanding Paper Award for the best paper in the 2009 volume of the journal Foresight. He also re-designed, convened, and for several years taught, the Master of Business Administration (MBA) unit on Corporate Strategy, bringing a unique corporate-level foresight-enhanced perspective to it.

He has a strong belief in the need for both rigorous intellectual discipline as well as practical pragmatic utility in "real world" contexts, and this belief lies at the heart of his approach to Futures Studies and strategic foresight. For over two decades he has used the multidisciplinary frameworks of Cosmic Evolution, Astrobiology, and 'Big History' to frame wide-ranging questions about the longer-term futures of global civilisation and humankind, and to explore how these far-reaching perspectives can inform and broaden our present-day strategic and policy choices at individual, organisational, institutional, societal, and planetary scales.

In August 2020, after 20 years at Swinburne, he was one of the "COVID redundancies" resulting from the global pandemic's devastating effect on the university sector. He remains connected with Swinburne, however, as an Adjunct Professor, while he assists current PhD students to finish. Since then, he has been a “freelance futurist”, which has included visiting fellowships at the Australian Defence College, guest presentations at the ANU’s National Security College, where he is a Futures Council member, and research and advisory work for the Strategic Foresight Branch of NATO’s Allied Command Transformation. He has also been revisiting earlier work on futures/strategic intelligence scanning undertaken two decades ago for Swinburne, via a ‘scanning retrospective’, aimed at further refining the practice of ‘futures intelligence analysis’.

He is a member of the World Futures Studies Federation, the Big History Institute, and the Association of Professional Futurists, and was a Founding member and former Board member (2012-2017) of the International Big History Association. He serves on the editorial boards of the journal Foresight, the European Journal of Futures Research, the Journal of Big History, and the Journal of Futures Studies.