Richard Sear

Managing Partner Everest Group

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Richard Sear leads Everest Group’s Advanced SciTech practice, whose brief is deliberately longer-horizon than most consulting work: not which vendor to pick this year, but which scientific and technological discoveries now in laboratories will have reorganised industries, cities and governments a decade from now, and what an organisation should be doing about it today. It is a discipline he has practised for his whole career. Before Everest Group he spent many years at Frost & Sullivan building and running its Visionary Innovation practice — the same long-range futures work under a different name — rising there to Partner, Senior Vice President and Chief Solution Officer. Everest Group credits him with 29 years of consulting across more than seventy countries and with engagements involving more than 250 chief executives and world leaders, including work with national governments and the U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Career Highlights

• Managing Partner at Everest Group, listed in both the firm’s Executive Leadership and Research Leadership teams, and head of its Advanced SciTech practice.
• Has consulted with more than 250 world leaders and chief executives at organisations including GE, Intel, FedEx, Volkswagen, Panasonic, ExxonMobil and Facebook.
• Has advised the governments of Mexico and the United Kingdom and the U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy.
• Has worked in more than seventy countries across a 29-year consulting career.
• At Frost & Sullivan, built and led the Visionary Innovation practice and rose to Partner, Senior Vice President and Chief Solution Officer.
• Sector expertise across healthcare, communications, aerospace and defence, energy and financial services.
• Author of hundreds of publications, a regular media commentator, and a recurring speaker at Everest Group’s Engage and Elevate conferences.

Professional Journey

Sear took a BA in geography at Middlesex University in 1995 and an MA at the University of Cambridge the following year, and went into consulting rather than academia. His formative years were at Frost & Sullivan, the research and growth consulting firm, where the work that became his speciality was called Visionary Innovation: mid- to long-term growth strategy built on structured analysis of how transformative developments — demographic, geopolitical, technological — would reshape a client’s market before the market itself noticed.

He built that practice and led it globally, first as Vice President and later as Senior Vice President, working across healthcare, communications, aerospace and defence, energy and financial services, and accumulating the sort of international range the work requires. By the end of his tenure he was a Partner, Senior Vice President and Chief Solution Officer at the firm, with responsibility extending beyond a single practice to how Frost & Sullivan packaged and delivered its offerings as a whole. He also sat on the organising side of the firm’s Growth Innovation Leadership Council, its executive convening programme.

At Everest Group he is a Managing Partner and leads the Advanced SciTech practice, the firm’s dedicated effort to study transformative science and technology discoveries and translate them into indicators leaders can act on. The distinguishing feature of the work is that it is research-grounded rather than speculative: the practice tries to identify measurable signals of how emerging science will affect education, business, cities, governments and society, rather than producing trend narratives. He appears in both the executive and research leadership sections of the firm’s own listings, reflecting a role that spans running the business and producing the research, and he is a regular presence on stage at Everest Group’s Engage and Elevate conferences.

Education

University of Cambridge

MA, awarded 1996

Middlesex University

BA, Geography, 1995