Stokes is Principal of Lodestar, which he founded to help organizations innovate by responding to the technological and cultural changes shaping their customers. Lodestar focuses on capturing daily life and its transformation through emerging practices in order to access the wider structures shaping people's thoughts, actions, use of tools and services. We then work to build strategies for differentiation from this foundation. Lodestar's clients have included the BBC, HBOS, Procter & Gamble, and Nokia.
Stokes was trained as a social anthropologist at the London School of Economics. His background is as a Director of XMod (the Experience Modeling discipline) at e-consultancy Sapient, a strategist and trend researcher at futures consultancy Henley Centre/HeadlightVision (now 'the futures company'), and most recently he was Philips Design's Director of Foresight, Trends & People Research for North America.
Stokes has won the Emrys-Peters Prize for anthropology writing, and a WPP Group Atticus Award for published thinking in marketing. He is a recognized practitioner of the growing field which applies consumer ethnography and design thinking to business strategy, and he spoke and published for the inaugural EPIC 2005 and 2006 (the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference).