Culture is humanity's greatest invention. We have created our own world and with it, our own freedoms and limitations. This means that most of the large-scale challenges that we face today are human-made. Here is the good news: humans should be able to resolve them. In order to do this, culture is in need of a grand new scheme. This is why THNK gathers bright people from all walks of life to take the lead in its design by way of combining creative exploration with scientific rigor, in an attempt to answer the questions of our modern day world.
Worldwide, THNK gathers talent, brilliance, and skills from a number of areas: science, technology, arts, design, business, and governance. These are the disciplines that can make a real difference in creative cooperation: from idea to implementation and from a local to a global scale. People from these very diverse backgrounds combined will be able to generate a collective capacity to solve genuine societal challenges, while respecting the insights of each other’s disciplines as well as those of co-creating stakeholders. Harnessing curiosity and novelty, balanced by analytical and conceptual thinking, is what captains of industry, political leaders, artistic icons, and scientific geniuses should do together and they should do it on an equal footing, because all of them are connected by one thing: their creative ingenuity.
The new businesses, new knowledge, and new designs that will be generated by these versatile minds will additionally greatly impact those who work under their leadership. Because creativity is fun, it is contagious—and this quality will eventually lead to a redesign of society and a deep change of culture, that is carried by a multitude of people. A new global mentality will emerge, which will be characterized by individual contribution—whether spiritual or material—of a new kind, and which is in balance with responsibility for what surrounds us.
This blog was written by Johan Hoorn on behalf of the THNK Education Team: Arjan Postma, Diana Krabbendam, Frank Kresin, Agnes Willenborg, Vincent Rump, and Yuri van Geest.