Click to www.EricBritton.org for current details.

Born in Mississippi and educated in New England and Europe with a broad background in the physical sciences, economics and public policy, Eric Britton was a founding member of EcoPlan in 1966 while laboring on a Ph.D. dissertation in the vexing area of economic development, technology and public policy as Visiting Scholar at the University of Rome under the Fulbright Program. The intention at the time was to create an effective forum of international collaboration and independent counsel on issues involving the management of technology as it affects people in their daily lives -- with the long term commitment that these issues plainly require. And here we are a full generation later, and this formula still looks pretty good.

The basic idea behind EcoPlan and his work more generally, which holds to this day, is that these issues lend themselves to cooperative problem-solving networks that can bring together and integrate the efforts of outstanding thinkers, researchers, concerned citizens, and practitioners from diverse disciplines, countries and points of view. The second prong of this concept is that for problem solving to be effective in the long run, it must be organized and developed directly with those who are most directly concerned taking a leading role in the process, whether in a company, in a public sector agency or in some place. Today, and with the help (sometimes) of the new technologies and organizational techniques that have emerged since the group's founding, this basic structure is still in place and hard at work in addressing challenging programs and projects in many places.

Britton's interests and work span a fair range of sectors and concerns, appropriately enough given the complexity and insistent interactions that the real world imposes. The primary thrust of his work have spanned assignments and projects in the fields of transport, communications, industry, energy, environment, work organization, physical planning, economics, so-called leisure and public policy (all of which, in our problem-solving perspective at EcoPlan, being intimately related). He has carried out or led several hundred major assignments in these areas over the years, and has published more than two hundred articles, reports, books, and sections of books, been involved in start-ups and counsel for a range of new media enterprises from magazines and Web sites through school programs, new theaters and other cultural carriers (all of which, of course, is of itself no measure of success).

While a fair portion of his time over the last decades has been given over to public policy issues and counsel, he makes his living primarily as an international consultant and advisor to industry and the financial community in the same basic areas on which his public sector work is focused, in the belief that there are many real advantages to working with both sides of the issues. The thrust of virtually all his work is to work with client teams and networks to uncover opportunities and to encourage innovation and prudent experimentation in problematical situations marked by system complexity, inertia and diversity of values, interests and time horizons.

His 1994 thinkpiece, Rethinking Work: New Concepts of Work in a Knowledge Society, is about to be reissued in a second edition by the European Commission. The special edition of World Transport Policy and Practice which he recently wrote and edited under the title The Information Society and Sustainable Development provides a fair summary of his thinking and approaches in these areas. In addition to his private sector consulting, he has served as advisor to more than twenty different national agencies, and maintained long term affiliations with the OECD and European Commission. He has served on the TRB Committee on Urban Transport Innovations and the editorial board of World Transport Policy & Practice, Mass Transit, and Traffic Engineering & Control.

An active partisan of alternative tools and problem-solving approaches, he has been active in expanding the group's public interest activities, including non-profit research, educational and media programs aimed both at adults and children. His role in creating The Commons will be familiar to some. In June 2000 he and The Commons were awarded the prestigious Stockholm Prize for their work with the mayor and people of Bogota to reshape that city's transportation system in the interests of sustainability and social justice.

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