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ThoughtLab: About

About Us

Trendsetters in analytics-driven thought leadership

ThoughtLab is an innovative thought leadership firm that creates fresh thinking and actionable insights through rigorous research and evidence-based analysis. Our firm specializes in using the latest quantitative and qualitative tools to examine the impact of technology on companies, cities, industries, and business performance.

Our multidisciplinary team of economists, industry specialists, and subject matter experts produce distinctive thought leadership to help clients engage private- and public-sector decision-makers. Our services include fielding business, consumer, investor, and government surveys; organizing executive interviews, meetings, and advisory groups; conducting economic modeling, AI sentiment monitoring, benchmarking, and performance analysis; and developing white papers, eBooks, infographics, and customer-facing analytical tools.

Our clients include top consulting firms, such as EY, Deloitte, PwC, KPMG, Accenture, and Cognizant; leading technology companies, such as Verizon, Cisco, Oracle, Microsoft, and Intel; major financial institutions, such as State Street, Visa, Mastercard, and J.P. Morgan Chase; and government institutions, such as the UN, IFC, UNECE, and the World Bank.

Meet the Team

Why We Founded ThoughtLab

%

86% of executives believe that thought leadership is a missed opportunity.

According to a recent study from Edelman/LinkedIn survey

Business leaders in today’s demanding marketplace want more than cookie-cutter thought leadership. They need actionable decision support that combines innovative thinking with analytical insights and best practice advice—all delivered through engaging executive formats.

Achieving this level of analytical excellence is challenging. It requires a blend of originality, quantitative rigor, industry expertise, and consulting know-how not typically found in any one firm. Simply put, visionary thinking requires visionary thinkers.

That is why we established ThoughtLab as a center of thought leadership excellence. We bring together the best economic, industry and thought leadership minds to create innovative, must-read analysis for business and government.

Our in-house team of top economists and thought leadership experts, along with our long-standing links to top universities, research institutes, and global media organizations, enable us to develop original ideas validated by quantitative evidence and presented in compelling ways.

What Barack Obama, The Economist, and ThoughtLab all have in common 

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “thought leader” was first used in 1887 to describe American minister Henry Ward Beecher.  It was reminted over a hundred years later in 1994 by Joel Kurtzman, former editor of the Harvard Business Review.  

But Lou Celi was one of the first publishing executives to turn it into a marketing strategy for business. He did this in the early 1980s when he was a director at Business International, where he hired Barack Obama as a writer on his editorial team. After The Economist Group acquired Business International in 1986, he expanded on his vision, setting up the first thought leadership unit for a major media group. That business model continues to this day. It has been copied by many media companies.  

In the late 2000s, with the media model becoming ubiquitous, Lou reinvented thought leadership again through the lens of economics when he was President at Oxford Economics. Then in 2015, Lou founded ThoughtLab to take thought leadership to a higher level, building a multidisciplinary thought leadership approach drawing on economists, technologists, engineers, and business and government leaders, together with an enriched mixed-methods research model.  In creating ThoughtLab, Lou has returned thought leadership to rightful place—true visionary thinking supported by evidence-based analysis and actionable insight.   

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