Peter Rakers is born and raised in Antwerp, Belgium. He worked with a variety of international companies specifically in the life science sector, where he also held management and leadership positions. He worked for companies such as Wyeth (presently Pfizer), Bristol-Myers Squibb, Unilever and IMS Health. At Bristol Myers Squibb, he was a member of the international training group for operational effectiveness. At the Ratiopharm group, a leading generic manufacturer in Europe (presently Teva), Peter was managing director of the group‘s Belgian operations until 2008.
In 2009, Peter started his own company - Blue Ocean View - and became an independent consultant with expertise on qualitative foresight methodologies. Peter helps clients achieving their vision, market differentiation and effective change while supporting the alignment process throughout the whole organization. He was involved in several public foresight projects at the European Commission FP7 program and was active as a strategic foresight facilitator for private organizations such as GSK Bio and Takeda. One of his major foresight accomplishments was the ASAP scenarios for pandemic preparedness for the Asia-Europe Foundation that ran for 6 years across Asia and Europe and was linked to the UNSIC program of the United Nations and the CAPSCA program of the airline companies in Asia-Pacific. In 2011, one of Peter's workshops was chosen as a cover picture of the UNSIC report on influenza related programs.
Peter is a certified coach and assessor for several coaching and assessment organizations. He gave middle and higher management trainings at the Brussels Airport Company and the European Patent Office. He’s an external coach for the Master in Management and CEMS Program at the Rotterdam School of Management and the Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School in Dublin. He also gives skill seminars on foresight and big data analytics for students in the CEMS and MBA programs.
Peter was involved in several projects such as Smart Digital Farming, a network of innovative companies in the agri-food sector, the H2020 project IOF2020 and the era-net ICT-AGRI. He also was a co-author of the ICT-AGRI’s strategic research agenda. SRIA is an initiative to strengthen the European research within the area of precision farming and to develop a common European research agenda concerning ICT and robotics in agriculture. Recently, he became the ethics advisor of the ERA-NET ICT-AGRI-FOOD project.
As those networks focus mainly on data innovation in the AgriFood sector, Peter felt the need to certify as a data protection officer in order to assist organizations on the General Data Protection Ruling which became fully active as of May 2018.
As of 2022, Blue Ocean View will became the preferred service provider of Esset Engage regarding stakeholder engagement projects. Recent projects were for the European Food Safety Agency (EFSA) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). In October 2022, the Horizon Europe project EU FARMBOOK, an interactive hub for agriculture and forestry knowledge, kicked off in Firenze.
