Adjunct Professor, (Faculty of Sciences, University of Helsinki, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Lapland, Faculty of Technology and Innovation, University of Vaasa), Research Director Jari Kaivo-oja is an expert working in the fields of business and technology foresight, planning sciences, innovation research, and sustainability science. His special fields are foresight methodologies in sustainability analyses, international energy economics, and trends and megatrends of general societal development. He has special expertise in energy economics, innovation research, climate change analyses, organisational knowledge management tools, and geopolitical security politics analyses. Jari Kaivo-oja has research experience in strategic and participatory foresight processes in Europa and in international contexts (especially in Africa, in the Middle East (The Middle East Foresight), in Black Sea Region (The Middle East Foresight and Black Sea Peace Building Foresight) and in Asia (3 years in the Lao PDR and in the Mekong River research program).

He has worked in the European FP6, FP7, and FP 8 (Horizon 2020) research programs collaborating with various European universities. He has been an expert evaluator of EU´s Security Programmes and other programs. He has worked as a Finnish national co-ordinator in the COST A22 (Foresight methodologies) and as an expert member of the international think tank of the European Sustainability Strategy Theme Network. He has worked for the European Foundations (Dublin), for the Eurostat, for the European Parliament (Brussels), as well as for the Nordic Innovation Centre (NIC, Oslo).

In Finland, he has been a researcher in research projects at the Academy of Finland, the VTT (Technical Research Centre of Finland), the Finnish Technology and Innovation Fund TEKES (now Business Finland), and various line ministries. He has experience as a scientific project evaluator in the Security Research Programmes of the European Union. He has been over 2 years a foresight expert blog writer for the SITRA (the Finnish Innovation Fund). He has been lecturing for the European Science Foundation (ESF), for the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS), and for the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS). In 2011 he was visiting scholar at Stanford University (Palo Alto, CA).

In 2019-2021, Dr Jari Kaivo-oja was the Principal Investigator (PI) of the Smart Specialization Strategy Tools with Big Data (SSST-BD) in the EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions program. Since December 2018 Dr Kaivo-oja was Research Professor and since June 2021 Dr Kaivo-oja has been Professor Atestatas (Social sciences) at the Kazimieras Simonavicius University (KSU). He has participated in many EU Erasmus training and capacity-building projects in Southeast Asia, especially in Laos, Cambodia, and Myanmar. Dr Jari Kaivo-oja has been planning and implementing 8 large EU Research projects. In 2018-2023, he was a researcher at the Strategic Research Council of the Academy of Finland in the EL-TRAN and in the Manufacturing 4.0 projects. Jari Kaivo-oja is one of the most cited Finnish future researchers in international peer-reviewed academic journals.