William E. Halal

William E. Halal

William E. Halal is Professor Emeritus of Management, Technology, and Innovation at George Washington University, Washington, D.C. An authority on emerging technology, strategic planning, knowledge, innovation, and institutional change, he has worked with numerous multinational corporations. Halal also co-founded the Institute for Knowledge & Innovation as a collaborative effort between the GW School of Business and the School of Engineering.

Halal’s work has appeared in numerous journals and he has produced six books: The New Capitalism (Wiley, 1986), Internal Markets (Wiley, 1993), The New Management (Berrett-Koehler, 1996), The Infinite Resource (Jossey-Bass, 1998), 21st Century Economics (St. Martin’s Press, 1999), and Technology’s Promise (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

Prof. Halal is the founder of TechCast, a web-based system that pools the knowledge of experts to forecast breakthroughs in technology, social trends, and wild cards to assist decision makers in managing a changing world.

Halal studied engineering, economics, and the social sciences at Purdue and Berkeley. Previously, he was a major in the U.S. Air Force, an aerospace engineer on the Apollo Program, and a Silicon Valley business manager. He serves on advisory boards of the World Future Society and other organizations, and his work has received prominent recognition.

The Noosphere Is Here

Journal Article

The great Jesuit anthropologist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, has long fascinated us with his vision that the world would evolve into a “noosphere,” [1] a great web of consciousness enveloping the Earth. It seemed a lovely but distant ideal, yet the Digital Revolution has now made that dream a reality.