Draft:William R. Cockayne

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This page is about the co-founder of Scout Electromedia and innovator William R. Cockayne. For other people with the same name, see William R. Cockayne (disambiguation).

William R. Cockayne
Education	Stanford University
Occupations	Innovator technologist
Known for	Cofounder of Scout Electromedia Strategic foresight tools Building Moonshots book

William R. Cockayne is an American innovator, technologist, and educator. He is the founder of the Stanford Foresight program at Stanford University and co-founder and chief technology officer of Scout Electromedia, the company behind the modo handheld device — a product The Economist later credited with providing "a foretaste of the use of location as a way to select content." His work spans three connected strands: early academic research in virtual reality and human–computer interaction; consumer mobile invention during the dot-com era; and the development of foresight as a teachable discipline within engineering and business education.

Virtual reality and human–computer interaction research

Cockayne's earliest contributions were to the academic study of virtual reality. In the early 1990s he curated and circulated an open directory of VR resources known as the vr_sites list, one of the period's reference points for the emerging field. His 1998 master's thesis at the Naval Postgraduate School, supervised by Michael Zyda and Rudy Darken, extended Edwin Fleishman's Human Ability Requirements framework and David Sturman's earlier work on whole-hand input to the problem of two-handed, whole-hand interaction in virtual environments, adding five haptic abilities to the taxonomy and applying it to the tasks of the U.S. Army 91B Field Medic under a DARPA Advanced Biomedical Training initiative. The parallel locomotion work with Darken on an omnidirectional treadmill for full-body VR immersion appeared at UIST '97. The editors of The Handbook of Task Analysis for Human–Computer Interaction later wrote that this line of research earned a "rightful place in this handbook because it involves such a novel input device — an omnidirectional treadmill for use in virtual reality applications — that not even the physical behavioral requirements were known." The most durable product of his NPS years was curricular. Cockayne helped develop an interdisciplinary graduate curriculum — Modeling, Virtual Environments and Simulation (MOVES) — drawing courses from computer science and operations research to address defense modeling and simulation. The program launched in 1996 and was formalized as the MOVES Institute by 2000; a contemporaneous account in IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications by Michael Zyda and Rudy Darken described it as a new model for the field.

Scout Electromedia and the modo

Cockayne began a doctorate in mechanical engineering at Stanford University but stepped away in 1998 to co-found Scout Electromedia with fellow Stanford alumni Dan Bomze and Geoff Pitfield. As CTO, he led the engineering and intellectual-property strategy for the modo, a wireless handheld that delivered city-specific lifestyle content to readers in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. The team developed mobile bar codes and location-based mobile advertising on small displays years before either became standard, work reflected in multiple patents. Journalist Teresa Esser devoted a section of her book The Venture Cafe (Warner Books, 2002) to Scout's founding and the technical and commercial choices that shaped the device. The modo received reviews in major outlets during its short commercial life. A New York Times Style feature by Penelope Green presented it as "a life coach to hold in your hand," and Bloomberg BusinessWeek reported that "thousands of people bought the $99 devices as soon as they went on sale in New York and Los Angeles," quoting industry analyst Kevin Werbach — then editor of Release 1.0 — to the effect that Scout, unlike its rivals, "wanted to change the world" and "was a company building technologies consumers could really use." When Scout's third funding round failed in October 2000 and the company was wound up one day before its Los Angeles launch, the modo became one of the more frequently cited dot-com era product failures. Cockayne moved next to Eastman Kodak, where he was recruited in 2000 to set up the company's Silicon Valley innovation incubator under the Kodak Venture Group, leading several spinouts from Kodak's research portfolio. By 2002 The Economist was describing him as a "Silicon Valley veteran." He founded Handstand, Inc. in 2009; its Travel by Handstand application received the Society of American Travel Writers Foundation's Lowell Thomas Award in the Travel App category — gold in 2012 and silver in 2013. The Handstand team later launched Nota, described in trade press as "the world's first mobile, collaborative textbook platform," with backing from Taiwanese entrepreneur Cher Wang.

Stanford Foresight and teaching

Cockayne returned to Stanford to complete his doctorate in mechanical engineering and joined the School of Engineering as a Consulting Associate Professor and Lecturer, teaching from 2004 through 2022. His central contribution as an educator was the founding of the Stanford Foresight program — with Larry Leifer, Tamara Carleton, and Michael Shanks — and the development of its ME410 course series on strategic foresight and innovation, which ran for two decades. The course became a recurring recommendation in student-curated lists of notable Stanford classes. The pedagogical model that emerged from ME410 was codified in the Playbook for Strategic Foresight and Innovation (2013), co-authored with Carleton and Antti-Jussi Tahvanainen and released under a Creative Commons licence with sponsorship from Tekes, the Finnish technology and innovation funding agency. The framework has since been used as a teaching reference by foresight programs at other universities; Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business faculty, in a 2018 article in World Futures Review on a decade of foresight teaching, group Cockayne among the "foresight education leaders" whose work has shaped the discipline. In 2023 Cockayne and Carleton published Building Moonshots: 50+ Ways to Turn Radical Ideas into Reality (Wiley), drawing on their joint teaching. The Financial Times review described the book as "easily digestible" and praised it for offering "the fruits of years teaching at business schools about innovation and start-ups." The book received a bronze medal in the Business Disruption / Reinvention category of the 2024 Axiom Business Book Awards.

Publications

Books

• Building Moonshots: 50+ Ways to Turn Radical Ideas into Reality, co-authored with Tamara Carleton, reviewed by The Financial Times and won the 2004 Axiom Business Book Award in the Business Disruption / Reinvention category (bronze) (Wiley, 2024)
• Playbook for Strategic Foresight and Innovation, co-authored with Tamara Carleton and Antti-Jussi Tahvanainen (Tekes, 2013)
• Mobile Agents, coauthored with Michael Zyda (Prentice Hall, 1998)

Edited collections

Inventing the Almost Impossible: Creating, Teaching, Funding, and Leading Radical Innovation, edited with Tamara Carleton and Shaun West (Springer, 2023)