Adam Parr

Adam Parr is an Anglo-French barrister, academic, author and businessman, and former Chairman and Chief Executive of the Williams Formula One team. He has lived and worked in Europe, Japan, South Africa and Australia and now lives in Oxford.

Since leaving Formula One, Adam’s main activity has been venture capital, and he has co-founded, invested in and chaired several businesses. These include Oxford Semantic Technologies Limited, an AI spin-out of the University of Oxford and Cheesecake Energy Limited, a spin-out from the University of Nottingham.

In 2020 he founded The Downforce Trust, a UK charity dedicated to accelerating action on climate change. The Trust has helped launch Downforce®, an innovative technology for measuring natural capital, and SRI 2030, an initiative to promote climate-smart rice cultivation, and works with UK Parliamentarians on nuclear power and climate security. Adam has also worked in policy areas such as education, sport for disadvantaged communities and modern slavery.

Adam has a PhD on the history of strategy from UCL University of London and has just submitted his PhD thesis on strategy and climate change at the University of Oxford. He has taught the Strategy option at Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government. He is a Business Fellow at the Smith School for Enterprise and the Environment at the University of Oxford and Research Associate at the John Porter Diplomacy Centre, Hertford College, Oxford.

Adam is the author of two books about strategy in Formula One: The Art of War – Five Years in Formula One; and co-author, with Ross Brawn, of Total Competition – Lessons in Strategy from Formula One. He has also written a book on the history of strategy, The Mandate of Heaven — Strategy, Revolution, and the First European Translation of Sunzi’s Art of War (1772), published by Brill in 2019.