How to leverage innovation…

We’re proud to present you www.ThinkTankThursday.com 

It’s all about helping each other!!

Break through your inspirational boundaries on a frequently (weekly?) basis!
We offer a free global label which makes it easy, accessible and fun to share knowledge in favor of innovation!

We ‘put the heads together’ in a modern way, using offline (live) and online brainstorm sessions.

Join in 2 clicks to share knowledge or organize your own ThinkTankThursday!

1. Our ThinkTankThursday platform: Submit your information in the sidebar (at the right!) to join! OR
2. Our LinkedIn group to discuss and brainstorm with fellow members

(you have to be a member of LinkedIn to join our TTT-group. You can always join our TTT-platform, at the right)

Why? Because it’s leveraging your weekly inspiration! (and it’s free!)
Read further if that’s not enough reason!

Questions, ideas or just want to contact us? Let us know what you think of the ThinkTankThursday label!

Thanks for your attention!

PS. 1   We are a free and open initiative. Join and help develop ThinkTankThursday!

PS. 2   Feel free to invite some others to join ThinkTankThursday with you! (just spread the word!)

PS. 3   We keep it (very) simple!

NEXT STEPS??

Share knowledge, ask for knowledge or organize your own TTT using our platform! Feel free to use it in the way it helps you the most!

It’s very easy to get started with ThinkTankThursday. After all, it’s about putting the heads together!

So, for today, just involve a (few) colleague(s) in that what you’re struggling with! Discuss what your challenges are and share experiences, knowledge and creativity to solve them!

Now you’ve taken this first step, challenge your colleagues to do the same! Or even better: organize your own ThinkTankThursday next week!

At www.ThinkTankThursday.com you can find all materials you need to organize a ThinkTankThursday yourself.

We wish you much inspiration!

Grafity on apartheids-wall

At www.sendamessage.nl we donated €30 to a charity foundation to fund small social, cultural and educational projects in Ramallah. For this donation Palestinians have written our statement on the apartheids-wall.

Without any further political aspirations or choosing any of both sides, we made the statement to put the heads together by the gravity-written text “How to solve this? Put the heads together @ ThinkTankThursday! www.ideavents.com”.

The result: our statement

We just want both parties to put their heads together and challenge themselves to find solutions, because we know there will be…

And please don’t stand aside. Share your opinion, share your thoughts and propose your possible solutions! Share it in your comments below or make your own statement on the wall: www.sendamessage.nl.

Because this is not putting the heads together...

Once you’ve joined a ThinkTankThursday –which makes it extremely easy to inspire each other– you’re convinced about the added value of participating in our ThinkTankThursday initiative!

Our approach? Just go sit together, involve outsiders and discuss your challenges together! Offline, online, or both!

ThinkTankThursdays always result in a mix of (apparently) obvious ideas and complex, specialized solutions. Diverse and always interesting to experience other (unexpected) points of view from ‘outsiders’!

You should try it yourself! Just organize one in your own area (or participate as outsider).

It’s not difficult: just put the heads together (including some outsiders) and start sharing your challenges. It’s easy and extremely cheap (free) to organize (or participate in) an inspiring ThinkTankThursday. It will fit in a one hour meeting and at www.thinktankthursday.com you will find the materials you need (for free!).

Remember: there’s always a need for knowledge & creativity sharing!

Join us at www.ThinkTankThursday.com (see sidebar) and become a member of our LinkedIn ThinkTankThursday-group!

Take for example  Roger Richardson who challenges you to come up with your problems. He will generate innovative ideas (with an ease, like it’s water out of a tap!)

What problem did you observe today?
Observation is the key. While doing todays activity identify some thing that took to long to accomplish. Watch all around. Many times we ignore problems since we know a way to work around them. Those problems are waiting for a solution. What did you see?
(Roger Richardson)

Today, besides some serious brainstorming, an interesting discussion elaborated on how to prevent your teabag paper to drop into the hot water. Very important discussion…

Erik Vos started this brainstorm by sharing his ‘frustration’:

Hey Roger, I totally support your apprach. Identifying a problem is the start of a solution. I love problems and see them as challenges. Its intersting too think about innovations and to helping people with their problems and support processes. I have a tiny little problem every day. The teabagpart which has to hang out of the teacup is dropping into my teacup. Paper in hot water. It doenst belong there. Why havent they thought about a small vertical open space where you can put the thread of the teabag?

 A whole discussion existed, thanks to input from Roger Richardson, Joris Scheepers, Rui Costa, and others.

 The (final) result?

Roger and Others! My proposed solution for the teacup problem: Could the solution be on an “external element” that is not part of the initial equation? please check my proposed solution at this my clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qN1OQ8l6zQ - we should see something were others see nothing -
p.s. I’m sure that the big hands of Erik can even handle this approach…

Rui Costa even uploaded his solution to Youtube (+special thanks to all of us!): 

We believe the fun factor is also important during innovation. It challenges you to think outside your frame of reference!

Join our LinkedIn group and challenge each other!

Share it! Challenge TTT-members to come with a solution you could impossibly think about!

Your fellow members at the ThinkTankThursday LinkedIn-group will provide you with out-of-the-box insights. They don’t suffer any bias like people who are already involved and will act far more logical from their own frame of reference.

Just try it, it’s free inspiration!

Get your inspiration at the ThinkTankThursday LinkedIn Group

Wouldn’t it be interesting if we develop a project to stride against poverty in development countries together?!

We already had some great cases on the poverty topic in this ThinkTankThursday group. Quite concrete already and mainly focused on how to fulfill development concepts. Why don’t develop our own project together, from scratch!

OUR OWN DEVELOPMENT PROJECT!

Just by using our collaborative knowledge and creativity @ ThinkTankThursday!

Let’s make use of our shared ‘brainpower’ and discuss all opportunities to solve poverty below: share ideas on how to solve poverty!

One step at the time.

Best of all: we aim to EXECUTE the development project together too!! So we’ll start from scratch and develop the whole project together: your opportunity to make a difference! To keep it structured, we’ll start with some idea generation first and then we’ll try to make it more tangible during the next days or weeks in order to develop a real project together!

Give your best shot: IDEAS!!

There are no wrong ideas, use your own frame of reference to generate a broad range of ideas. In next phase we’ll bring some focus in the project and select the best ideas together. Can’t wait for your inspiring input!

Think about:

• Local entrepreneurship
• Education
• Infrastructure
• Communication
• Medicines
• Distribution (to rural areas)
• Etc.

…a project against poverty powered by ThinkTankThursday’s collaborative knowledge and creativity… WOW!!

ThinkTankThursday starts crowdsourcing project against poverty

The free open innovation initiative ThinkTankThursday challenged its community to stride against poverty in a collaborative development project. The big aim: use collective inspiration for a better world! Using the statement “How can WE stride against poverty??”, ThinkTankThursday initiated a collaborative project for the good cause from scratch to execution.

At the website www.ThinkTankThursday.com, initiator Rob Veldt invited everybody to join this initiative: “When we just use our collective knowledge and creativity, we should be able to make a difference together!”. Using its worldwide community of free-thinking members, ThinkTankThursday is not only able to generate a wide range of innovative ideas to solve poverty. Together, the ThinkTankThursday community will also co-create the full project plans and even execute projects using the local presence of its community members!

To make it as easy as possible for everybody to join the project, ThinkTankThursday uses ‘just’ the widely accepted platform LinkedIn for the project. Veldt: “With ThinkTankThursday we aim to simplify innovative initiatives, so we make sure we are present where most of the potential participators are!”. Since the majority of our online participators is already a LinkedIn member they are not obliged to join another community, they just join the ThinkTankThursday-LinkedIn group (http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=1129637).

“This totally fits the free ThinkTankThursday concept: we aim to simplify innovation, just ‘put the heads together and involve some outsiders!’ is how we would say it”, continues Veldt, “the overall purpose of the ThinkTankThursday initiative is to make use of innovative capacity that’s already there”. ThinkTankThursday stimulates its members to inspire each other and solve innovative cases together. On the other hand it offers a free channel for organizations to solve their innovative challenges by using collaborative knowledge and creativity.

ThinkTankThursday pays specific attention to projects for a better world. Veldt: “not only because those are the projects that could need free inspiration, knowledge and creativity, but also because those are the projects that are most inspiring for our members!”. Win-Win for both parties, while the non-commercial ThinkTankThursday initiative just wants people and organizations to share their knowledge, creativity and inspiration more often!

Editors note:

More information: Rob Veldt, mobile phone +31(0)634501721 or mail rob.veldt@thinktankthursday.com. 

Press release as Word document: http://www.thinktankthursday.com/downloads/Press%20Release_crowdsourcing%20against%20poverty.doc

Logo: http://www.thinktankthursday.com/downloads/Logo_ThinkTankThursday_400×200px.png 

Starting with our wish to leverage our collaborative knowledge, creativity and inspiration for the good cause, we initiated a valuable brainstorm with our TTT-community on how to fulfill this wish. Below you will find a ‘short’ review of the output to date, which will help us to focus and select the best idea(s).

The most IMPORTANT FINDINGS during the discussion are that: 

• we have to approach this project with the local ‘ordinary people’ as our main objective, 
• we have to involve locals on structural base, 
• we should create hope and commitment, 
• we have to leave our paradigm in order to understand their needs, values, culture, resources, skills, etc.,
• education is an important point of interest, whatever  you’re ‘bringing’,
• it’s not just copy/pasting proved development projects from other areas,
• the solution has to fit their needs, not just our egos,
• it’s not about money, but about enabling the poor to take care of themselves (where a barter with the poor could be a fair way also),
• the poor should be an active and intrinsically motivated part of the solution (bottom-up),
• some influential people as committed ambassadors of our initiative would leverage its credibility and with that its impact,
• it will help if the project could be glamorized and popularized by being a totally new innovative concept against poverty (e.g. using virtual reality),
• the resulting concept should be as easy as possible at the same time in order to make it available for everybody
• there is also much that we can learn from the locals we aim to help (e.g.  inspiration, experience, knowledge on local herbs, daily survival tips, local (hand)crafts, etc.)
• the focus should be more on understanding particular problems than immediately identifying a likely solution

More CONCRETE IDEAS that resulted from the discussion are:

• text mobile phones involving specific regions in coming up with ideas. (mobile is much more developed than internet around the world) >> locals will be able to help other locals that are normally not within reach by sharing their knowledge.
• paying consultants FROM rural and hungry areas to teach us their daily survival tips >> those will probably be mind shifting approaches that will affect our wealthy point of view. Probable more about the core, less complex. As a side effect this can be a way to let these people ‘grow’ in terms of self-esteem by realizing the valuable information they possess. We can let them grow while mirroring ourselves and our too complex way of living.
• adult education using the barter system (teach me to read and I’ll teach you sewing). That goes for anyone involved in the project. >> This could result in local marketplaces where locals can redefine value since it’s not only about products, also about services.
• it might be wise to try and be hungry for a while to better understand what issue we are dealing with. […] not talking about a diet, but being really hungry, for an extended period, days at least, for our solution to be real human-centered and one that fits their needs, and not just our egos. >> We shouldn’t  take ourselves too serious while other people are suffering hunger. And with the savings we realized by not buying food, we should invest in poverty projects! Interesting point is that we wouldn’t suffer hunger voluntary because it’s not good for our health… THAT’s exactly the case!!
• free text messages to mobile phones with relevant information for that specific area. >> weather conditions, trade info, announcements of important events in the area, etc.
• enabling much small-scaled initiatives by supporting local role models in their intrinsically motivated initiatives.  Bottum-up approach where we deal with the problems in an inside-out way.
• a VIRTUAL MUSEUM of (or against) poverty. By the means of Nobel Prize Winner Mr. Muhammad Yunus: that poverty must be banned into a museum – must get rid of.

Since we have a direct contact with Nobel Prize Winner Muhammad Yunus, we will elaborate on the last idea (which does not imply we will execute this idea, that’s up to you). This also because a virtual museum is able to include more of the above mentioned ideas in one common concept. In a virtual museum it could be possible to:

• Have three sections of the ‘museum-tour’: (1) memorial section to those who suffered from poverty and still do, (2) hope section with previous solutions that were successful, and (3) cocreation section where solutions and funding can be collected for current poverty issues.
• Provide a stage for social entrepreneurship >> local initiatives by (or for) locals to create awareness by the museum visitors and give these visitors the chance to enable local initiatives by donating directly to these local initiatives.
• Learn more about the real problems >> involving locals in the museum which makes it possible to really understand the problems their dealing with (instead of immediately identifying solutions for problems we think we know).
• Enable local role models by leveraging their small-scale initiatives. Use the museum as a stage for their initiative and generate direct micro funding by the museum visitors (a.k.a. crowdfunding).
• Create a digital market place for local products and services, including consulting activities like mentioned earlier: use local knowledge to solve problems in our wealthy world. Locals should be able to ‘pitch’ their offer.
• Make it possible to get in direct contact with locals. Like the Foster Parents concept, but more direct by using mobile phones to discuss local issues and help each other. People will get committed when their directly involved with the poor locals.

Well, this will be the review to date. Next step is to focus on only one to three ideas to develop further, together of course! So, please let us know which idea(s) you think should be co-created in the ThinkTankThursday project against poverty!

Share your choice and comments! >> here at the ThinkTankThursday LinkedIn group

At SlideShare we have published a simple slideshow that makes it extremely easy for you to organize your own (online or offline) ThinkTankThursday brainstorm session!

This enables you to leverage the innovative capacity of your own area! Share creativity and inspiration to solve challenges, just by bringing innovation back to its simple core: Put the heads together and involve outsiders to think out of the box!