About Futures Insight Research

Futures Insight Research (FIR), a Vancouver-Island-based BC Benefit company, provides independent research and advisory work for organizations navigating technology-driven economic and institutional change. FIR helps clients assess emerging risks and opportunities, clarify strategic priorities, and make better-informed decisions.

Technology can advance faster than the rules, capabilities, and evidence needed to use it well. FIR examines that gap through economic research, institutional analysis, and horizon scanning.

Areas of inquiry

AI and economic change — measuring emerging effects on productivity, work, organizational capability, and public decision-making.
Emerging-technology governance — assessing institutional capacity, policy options, research priorities, and long-term implications under uncertainty.
Bitcoin, energy, and economic systems — analyzing Bitcoin’s economic and institutional development, including mining and energy-system applications.
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. The 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

Murray Rudd, PhD, leads FIR. He is an applied economist and former university professor with experience in environmental economics and policy, institutional analysis, survey and mixed-methods research, horizon scanning, and decision-making under uncertainty. His current research focuses on emerging technologies such as AI and Bitcoin, energy and compute infrastructure, and long-term adaptive capacity.

Read Murray Rudd’s profile, publications, and experience →