Bill Royce is a truly dedicated SRI staff member, who for thirty years contributed both to important project substance and to the leadership of SRI’s marketing offices. He was a business economist with great insight into economic fundamentals and the value of solid, practical planning as well as a very congenial representative of SRI. His work continues to influence SRI programs and economies around the world.
Bill Royce came to SRI in 1954 as the head of a new office in Portland, Oregon. Within a year or so, he was engaged in the economic planning and site selection for the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, and was traveling the country to assess the functions that had led to the financial success of existing venues like the Met and Carnegie Hall. The resulting SRI recommendation for a multi-unit facility influenced both the final design of the offerings of the Kennedy Center and its site at Watergate. In 1957 Bill Royce helped the Commission for Seattle Century 21 in its economic planning and site location. Seattle’s fair became the first financially successful world’s fair.
In mid-1959 Bill Royce replaced Ed Robison in the leadership of an important Ford Foundation project to help build up the business acumen of the middle class in post-independence India. There he managed the SRI-formed National Council for Applied Economic Research, which was the first agency to gather demographics in India and still exists today.
From there, Royce joined the Long Range Planning Service (LRPS), serving as its Director from 1965 to 1968. In 1971, he became the director of the Tokyo Office and in charge of SRI East Asia from South Korea to Hong Kong. He held that position until 1976. While there, he became a founding director of the Japan Society for Corporate Planning.
After that assignment, Bill Royce returned to project work in the Business Intelligence Program, where, with Arnold Mitchell, he helped promote, with reports and seminars in the United State and Europe, the earlier-developed SRI concept of business “stakeholders.” Following his retirement in 1984, Bill Royce helped in the formation and operation of the SRI Alumni Association.
Bill Royce’s legacies as an industrial economist and pragmatist can still be seen in the continued success of the Business Intelligence Program and the Tokyo Office at SRI and in his long-lasting influence on economic stability around the world.