Ian Cooper is a partner in Eclipse Research Consultants, based in Cambridge, England. Unusually for an architect, he has spent his working life not as a practitioner, but as a researcher - first in academia and for the last 18 years in the private sector as an independent research consultant. As he is the first to acknowledge,

"I am strongly driven by curiosity. I always want to know What? closely followed by Why? I am perpetually intrigued by what is coming over the horizon, by what people in the construction industry are going to be expected to cope with next. I spend much of my time scanning outside construction, looking for new developments before they break over or inside the sector."

Ian has worked extensively on the procurement, management and operation of the built environment, particularly in relation to resource management and sustainable development practices in the UK.

In 1999-2000, he acted as convenor and editor for the RICS Research Foundation's futures study, 2020 Visions of the Future. And, since 1999, he has produced a series of fourteen Company Profiles for the Construction Best Practice Programme outlining the management of continuous improvement in 'leading edge' UK construction firms. He recently completed (2002) two evaluation studies directed at assessing the lessons learned on knowledge management from change programmes introduced under Rethinking Construction - demonstration projects run by M4I and the Housing Forum and the pilot Mentoring Support Scheme promoted by the Construction Best Practice Programme.

Ian was a founding co-director of the University's cross-disciplinary Centre for Sustainable Urban and Regional Futures. He works closely with SCPM on its EU-funded research on sustainable urban development. He acted as facilitator to the BEQUEST 'concerted action' (1998-2001) whose purpose was to build a common language and framework for the assessment of urban sustainability. He is playing similar role on the INTELCITY thematic network whose purpose is joint scenario planning between the EU's ICT and Sustainable Urban Development research communities.

"I value working with the University because it gives me opportunities to pursue research agendas that are not open to me as a consultant in the private sector. Often my clients don't yet understand the significance of the issues involved. Or the issues straddle the boundary between construction and other areas, like planning, which my clients see as outside their domain or remit. Or their time horizons are too long to fit within my clients' short to medium term frameworks for formulating policy and making decisions. "