[emphasize-text]Less than two years past launching THNK, we are now starting to seriously Scale our concept, both in geographical impact and online presence. At THNK, we are on a mission: to develop the next generation of creative leaders that will have societal impact on the world. We believe the answer to solve the impending problems of 2050 is passionate, visionary, and creative leadership. This isn’t just about generating ideas. It’s also about making it happen.[/emphasize-text]
We started our mission two years ago, at our Westergasfabriek campus in Amsterdam, inviting our handpicked classes of commercial, corporate and social entrepreneurs from across the globe into our THNK Home.
Increasingly we are being invited into the homes of others as well, in other parts of the world. Berlin, Dubai, Vancouver and Delhi are recent and upcoming stops on our journey. Our programs range from a one-day workshop with 80 General Managers of a leading international hotel chain to 12-day programs for innovation leaders in a leading international mobile telephone provider. These partners help us to seriously scale our mission. Scaling is the fourth element in our process of concept development – the THNK Creation Flow.
Our THNK Creation Flow, the structured way of coming up with breakthrough creativity, combines deeply exploring a new topic (Sensing), with generating big ideas (Visioning), with rapidly testing and improving concepts (Prototyping). While we continue to do Sensing, Visioning and Prototyping ourselves at THNK around our mission, our emphasis is now on Scaling. Scaling we have defined as the successful introduction of innovations that spread rapidly in non-linear fashion, seemingly self-propelled and with relatively little effort, resulting in an outsized impact.
So we are really excited when partners like The Design Village propose us to jointly host a three-day workshop to accelerate the innovation leadership skills of emerging creative leaders in Delhi, India. We have distilled the core elements of our Creative Leadership program into a three-day “Taste of THNK” workshop in 2014. Partnerships like these help us spread THNK and our impact way beyond Amsterdam. But extending our physical presence is just one of the ways we are Scaling.
Equally exciting is our new online program that extends our presence beyond Amsterdam in a virtual way: Start Innovating Now. This hybrid on- and offline course helps people to come up with innovative concepts and thereby Scales our impact in another way.
There is still a lot we need to learn ourselves about successful Scaling, however the initial signs are encouraging. If you believe you can help us further Scale our impact, please contact us.