About Futures Insight Research
Emerging technologies can advance faster than the capabilities, evidence, and policy needed to use them effectively.
Futures Insight Research (FIR), a Vancouver-Island-based company, provides independent research, education, and advisory work for organizations and individuals navigating technology-driven economic and institutional change.
FIR helps clients assess emerging risks and opportunities, clarify strategic priorities, and make better-informed decisions.
Services
- Information gaps — identifying and prioritizing information gaps in emerging technologies and their goverance
- Bespoke research — design, implementation, analysis, and production of applied and peer-reviewed research outputs
- Research facilitation — specification of needs and strategy, team assembly, project assessment and guidance, and editorial review
- Capacity building - educational programming, workshop design and delivery, one-on-one and team mentoring for building research capacity
Areas of inquiry
- AI and economic change — measuring emerging effects on productivity, economic valuation, economic impact, and public decision-making
- Bitcoin, energy, and economic systems — analyzing Bitcoin’s economic and institutional development, including mining and energy-system applications
- Emerging-technology governance — assessing institutional capacity, policy options, information gaps, and long-term implications under uncertainty
- Adaptive capacity and resilience — examining how technology affects the assets, capabilities, and decisions that help households, firms, and public institutions respond to change
How FIR works
FIR combines applied economics, institutional analysis, and structured horizon scanning. Our work distinguishes evidence from interpretation, makes uncertainty explicit, and focuses on the incentives and institutional conditions that shape real-world outcomes.
The aim is decision-ready insight: analysis that is rigorous enough to withstand scrutiny and clear enough to inform action.
Research leadership
Dr. Murray Rudd leads FIR. He is an applied economist and former university professor with decades of experience in environmental economics and policy, institutional analysis, survey and mixed-methods research, horizon scanning, and decision-making under uncertainty.
Read Murray Rudd’s profile, publications, and experience
Contact
Contact for research, advisory, speaking, or collaboration inquiries.