Futurology has a chequered past. In the middle years of the last century, entirely sensible and respectable research foundations were convinced that by now we would all be commuting by jet-pack and holidaying on the Moon.

A couple of decades ago, with the arrival of the cybernetic revolution, we would be living lives of unimaginable leisure while robots shouldered the drudgery.

Futurologists have an almost unblemished record of missing the effects of truly transformational developments — the oil price shock, the computer and the mobile phone.

Christophe Jouan admits to being a futurologist, but understandably prefers the labels of sociologist and consultant. He is managing director of the Future Foundation, which provides companies with research into future trends and what their impact might be on products and marketing.

The business was founded by two former staff from Henley Business School and when Mr Jouan arrived in December 1997 he was the first full-time employee. In 2005 it was sold to the business strategies side of Experian, the credit information group.

He and his 40-strong team use a database and outsourced market research to extrapolate trends that might affect individual projects brought to them by clients. He is chary of giving individual details, but the Foundation was recently hired by Lloyds TSB. “They came to us and wanted innovative insurance products over the next ten years.” The work produced six new potential concepts, one identifying the potential for insuring digital assets, for example, whether personal photos or corporate data. All six were tested by vox pop interviews; five were retained by the client.

He has worked with a television channel on programmes that might be of interest to a specifically male audience. Again, no details; but cars are at least one of them, one deduces.

The Foundation worked with the owners of a Norwich-based evening newspaper on a redesign that moved the news content away from its staple of gloomy local stories — “a lot of whingeing”, he says — to a more international outlook. The research threw up the useful fact that the paper had failed to recognise changing patterns of work and was being distributed 40 minutes too late for the evening rush hour.

Consultants brought in from outside to advise businesses have a bad reputation. They often labour long and expensively to produce, in Basil Fawlty's words, “the bleeding obvious”. Mr Jouan counters: “People may think of a couple of trends, three or four for clients to take into account. We come up with a comprehensive set.”

He continues in his lightly accented English: “Something that never ceases to amaze me ... Big companies do have an understanding of social trends, but some have never looked at what consumers want, to put it politely.”

I present him with an ad hoc project. I am planning to launch a new range of raincoats. What factors would he consider? First, obviously, what is selling at the moment and what the target market is wearing. Their spending power and the degree to which the product can be individualistic, different from the rest.

He reels off more factors. Ethical consumption, which is important for some youth markets, who want to know about sourcing, renewability of ingredients, but not all. Today there is also something called “inconspicuous consumption”, he says. “There's a move away from displays of wealth through clothing towards, if anything, a display of softer values. It's no longer fashionable, as it was in the 1980s, for a coat to look expensive.”

I ask for more trends to watch. In ten years' time, he says, there will be very little “live TV”. By this he means programmes whose timing is posted on the schedules, rather than TV provided at a time demanded by the consumer. This is widely forecast in media circles. But the schedules will not disappear entirely. “Appointment TV will co-exist alongside customised TV. TV is used as social currency, something that people talk about. Having these events, which can be live, will remain of importance.” This is broadcasting that provides what the Americans call “water-cooler conversation” the next day, watched and then discussed by all.

Then there is the increasing importance of live events, social gatherings that give people something to rally around, Mr Jouan says. One example is the growth of the live festival, which is requiring the music industry to change its business model, relying on appearances rather than CDs to generate revenue.

The most significant trend, he claims, and one that comes out in research again and again, is the rise of the family and social networking. This may involve an extended family, through relationship break-up, and even friends. “Increasingly, very close friends became part of your very close surroundings, part of a close family.

“The family is as important as ever, I would suggest more important. Parents spend more time with their kids, especially men. There's the growth of ‘quality time'.”

This is partly the effect of affluence and may be a trend reversed in hard economic times. But it is also driven by technology, mobile phones, e-mails and the internet, the growth of social networking sites that allow large numbers of people to stay in touch across long distances.

The average teenager, in an evening on Bebo or whatever, probably has as many out-of-school social interactions as his pre-digital equivalent achieved in a month and this encourages the growth of wider networks. “The social aspects are central to your life. Friends, family, colleagues are the highest life priorities,” he suggests. The internet, rather than being a solo leisure activity, increasingly will be used to facilitate those face-to-face contacts that remain important.

If this is true, it suggests businesses need to tap into this connected market rather than rely on existing advertising channels, for example, using those social sites. This is difficult. There is little trust put on existing advertising messages, and those interconnections mean bad publicity, distortions of the message and bad perceptions, spread extraordinarily quickly, he says.

More curiously, Mr Jouan is also exercised by the spread of what he calls “smart boredom”, which is “value placed on doing things that were perceived as boring in the past”. He argues that in the acquisitive 1990s, “the fashion was to try lots of new things. There was a cult of social capital based on how many things you have, how many boxes you'd ticked. It was fashionable to be busy.”

In the more chilled-out Noughties, a higher value is put on passive activities, research suggests, hobbies that previously might have been seen as boring. The Foundation carried out a study into which of 40 or 50 leisure activities were seen as the most attractive. Passive ones, such as simply watching television, scored highest. He points to the bizarre but genuine recent cult among celebrities of taking up knitting.

Meanwhile, boring activities such as queueing or catching the train can be enlivened by new technology — the mobile phone again, the BlackBerry, the iPod. If staying in is the new going out, being bored is the new being busy.

It is hard to know how seriously to take some of the wilder fringes of this social extrapolation from a Frenchman, 44 today, who arrived in a position to hand them out by a circuitous route. Born and educated in Rouen, Normandy, his first jobs were in IT, which exposed him to business and finance.

After a two-year diversion as a professional player, at a national level, and coach of table tennis, he moved to the UK in 1991 with only “school English — I couldn't understand a word”. After working in a bar, he became a self-employed teacher of French to business people.

“Britain was always seen to be far ahead in fashion and music, even though I came to a country which was a bit depressed, in the middle of a recession.”

He acquired some impressive qualifications in his adopted language, including an MA in Communications Studies. At the Foundation, he rose to run nVision, the web-based information database, and then the Foundation itself.

The key to any forecasting, he says, is to use the past and present to understand the future. Though unforeseen events can intrude, social trends drive any business sector and target market. “We're not Marxist — but the ideas behind it are a semi-Marxist way of looking at the world.”

CV: Christophe Jouan

Born: 1964, Rouen, France

Career: 1985 trainee computer programmer, Shell; 1986-89 IT programmer, CERP pharmaceutical company, Rouen; 1989-91 professional table tennis instructor; 1991-97 self-employed French tutor; 1997-2000 research assistant/ consultant, The Future Foundation; 2000-05 general manager/managing director, nVision; 2005-present managing director, The Future Foundation