[7] GBN was founded in Berkeley, California, in 1987 by a group of entrepreneurs including Peter Schwartz, Jay Ogilvy, Stewart Brand, Napier Collyns, and Lawrence Wilkinson.
[7] The company grew to include a core group of "practice members", and over a hundred individual network members (or "RPs") from a range of different fields, such as Wired editor Kevin Kelly,[8] social media expert Clay Shirky, anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson, economist Aidan Eyakuze, musician Brian Eno, biotechnologist Rob Carlson, and China scholar Orville Schell.
As of 1998, The Economist reported that GBN had nearly 100 clients, "ranging from blue-chip firms such as IBM and AT&T to the government of Singapore and the National Education Association".
In 2004, there was widespread media attention about a report that the Global Business Network prepared for the United States Defense Department which predicted "killer droughts through much of Europe, nuclear war between Pakistan and India over drinking water supplies, conflict between China and the US over Saudi oil, and an inland sea in California's Central Valley.
[15] The report explored four hypothetical scenarios, titled Lock Step, Clever Together, Hack Attack and Smart Scramble, focused on solutions to issues of global pandemics, climate change, terrorism, food insecurity, cyberattacks, disinformation, and associated crises.