Thought leader is business jargon for an entity that is recognized for having innovative ideas.
The term was coined in 1994, by Joel Kurtzman, editor-in-chief of the Booz, Allen & Hamilton magazine, Strategy & Business. “Thought leader” was used to designate interview subjects for that magazine who had business ideas that merited attention. Among the first designated “thought leaders,” were British management thinker, Charles Handy, who advanced the idea of a “portfolio worker” and the “Shamrock Organization”, Stanford economist Paul Romer, Mitsubishi president, Minoru Makihara, and University of Michigan strategist, C.K. Prahalad, author of a number of well known works in corporate strategy including “The Core Competence of the Corporation” (Harvard Business Review, May-June, 1990); and his co-author, Gary Hamel, a professor at the London Business School. And at the turn of the millennium Chris Harris in his trend leading insight book Hyperinnovation, the first treatise to begin to address a rapidly interconnecting, growing, technologically innovative world.
This term can also be used for an applied research center or a company (often a small business) that integrates professional ethics with highly-effective leadership development.
According to commentators such as Elise Bauer, a distinguishing characteristic of a thought leader is “the recognition from the outside world that the company deeply understands its business, the needs of its customers, and the broader marketplace in which it operates.”
Leadership is deliberately causing people-driven actions in a planned way to accomplish the leader’s agenda.
—Phil Crosby
New Age philosophies have adapted the concept- “…leadership development is rooted in personal development & organizational transformation is rooted in individual transformation.”
There’s an emerging business for managing consulting firms providing Thought Leadership services, such as Oxford Economics and their recently formed Thought Leadership team. They have constructed a website based on this principle at Oxford Thought.