Professor Markku Wilenius

Senior Advisor, Adj. Professor Finland Futures Research Center

Professor Markku Wilenius received his Ph. D. in Political Sciences and completed his doctoral thesis on sociology of climate change in 1997. Dr. Markku Wilenius has acted among the very few professors of futures studies in the whole world.

His genuine interests lie in understanding the challenges and possibilities of the long-term future and bringing this foresight to the strategic thinking of society and companies.

During his career he has served in many major companies and high-level governmental bodies to bring new insight to their future activities. Markku has had a deep interest in understanding how culture can be seen more clearly as an asset for the whole society as well as for the companies.

In 2002-2004 he lead a major study where he, together with his research group, looked more closely at the interaction between culture and economics with the idea that this insight can contribute essentially to our understanding of the future competitiveness of Finnish society at large. As a result, in 2004 he published a widely appreciated book “Towards Creative Economy”. He has continued this work by using values assessment methods with a number of companies to analyze their current organization culture.

He is Vice-Chair of the advisory board of the European Futurists Conference, a body for professional European futurists. His current major research effort is to understand the long socio-economic waves and their implications particularly to Finnish economy and society.