5 reasons to take your next step with THNK

Launching in September 2018, Amsterdam Class 14 features a globally diverse cohort typical of THNK, with participants joining us from 17 different countries. While the group includes our usual international mix of creative leaders hailing from North and South America, Europe, Asia, Australia, and the Middle East, Class 14 features THNK’s first ever participants from Honduras, Iraq, Macedonia, and Uganda.

When you apply for THNK, we ask that participants have an initiative to advance through the program – be it entrepreneurial or intrapreneurial.

When considering applications, we look for individuals who have endeavors that are scaleable, innovative, and have a positive societal impact. Consider THNKer Joost de Kluijver, whose business Closing the Loop aims to ensure that e-waste such as old cellphones are collected and recycled responsibly in developing countries. Closing the Loop aims for profit, but also for ‘a world where waste is not wasted.’

During his time with THNK, Joost improved Closing the Loop’s position in the telecom industry, strengthened its role as a circular frontrunner and develop its business case, all while improving his management and leadership skills. Learn more about Joost’s story here.

THNK is unlike any school you’ve attended before. With no lectures, no tests, and no formal grading system, experiential learning is central.

Participants discover a new perspective and gain empathy during an exercise called “Walk in the Shoes”. In order to deeply understand their users, we invite participants to immerse themselves in a new context and behave as the user. This immersion develops a deep understanding of the user’s frustrations, delights, beliefs, aspirations and gives informed intuition from embodied experience, far more than could be discovered through simple observation or surveys.

Participant Aleksas Drozdovskis took this a step further and filmed his experience while wearing our “Old Age Simulation Suit”, capturing his growing empathy as he walked the streets of Amsterdam in the shoes of his target user.

With a mission to develop and support creative leaders around the world to resolve large societal challenges, THNK includes positive societal impact directly in our programming. 

Through the Executive Program, you will apply cutting-edge innovation tools to a real societal challenge. A learning-by-doing experience that allows participants to put their leadership into practice while working with peers, this aspect of the program gives THNKers the opportunity to come up with triple bottom line solutions that consider people, planet, and profit.  

In the first days of each class, what surprises our participants most is how quickly they form serious lifelong bonds with their classmates. That deep connection, often tough to find in adulthood, extends to the entire THNK community. When you join THNK, you join a curated global network acting with shared purpose.

Here’s what Class 11 participant Kgomotso Matsunyane had to say following her first module of the Executive Program: