The BMW Guggenheim lab is an amazing initiative that I got involved in this year. A temporary and mobile laboratory/urban think tank/art and community centre to solve the wicked questions of living in world cities.
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The Learning Lab is an independent studio and think tank founded by dr. Thieu Besselink. It develops and hosts creative learning and creation environments for transition learning in higher education and organisations at the crossroads of personal and social development, science, art and collaborative entrepreneurship. Continue Reading →
The Learning Lab starts a new collaboratory at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies to create a new learning ecology with honours students of VU, UvA, and AUC, teachers and innovators. Very excited! Continue Reading →
The concept is easy, if a school and its direction are imaginative and courageous enough to not only imagine their dream school, but also want to try out how it would look like to get one important step closer to its realisation, they can ask for people to join their ‘Dream Team” with whom they will design one day, the 28th of February, on which we will run the school as that ‘dream school’ or try out important elements from that vision in real world prototypes.
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Wednesday night we had the screening of the documentary that Victor van Doorn and Jochem Smit made of the Learning Lab in Pakhuis de Zwijger. Never had so many beautiful reactions, than you. Twitter: #learninglab
Connecting on the values of innovation, creativity, entrepreneurship, and diversity 20 selected cutting edge thinkers and innovators from Amsterdam met 20 New York pioneers from different professional fields for a transatlantic dialogue that pushes the frontiers of civic engagement and social entrepreneurship.
Pretentious? I don’t know. In any case, the fact that there is a network called Pioneers is a sign that something is going on. Sunday April 5th I joined Pioneers in Felix Metitis, Amsterdam, and we found out a few things;
1. There is a common language emerging among the creative class that is not bound to a specific place on earth. I felt stronger than ever that I only needed two words for understanding with these pioneers from very different fields (cultural, legal, political, social, economic, and scientific).
2. Different networks of creatives are increasingly getting linked. They do not try to stay within their own sub culture, but are continuously looking outward and opining up in order to broaden their social capital, knowledge, and collective impact. This is very different from the past, where networks of student movements, artists, lawyers, political parties, religious groups, unions, or activists were very much self centered in their outlook.
3. Pioneers are the forerunners who create new roads where there weren’t any before. They are the people who build the bridge between the old era and the new, they take the first blows and are not likely the ones that benefit the most from their effort, even though their living on the edge allows for a very colourful life.
4. Despite the daunting prospects concerning various developments in the world, there is a ‘Yes we can’ mentality. A much needed optimism that is very different from for example the 1960′s flower power protest movements. This time we are here to build. I must say that although there is much movement, I still miss a bit The Farm attitude, which would probably sound more like ‘Yes we Do.’ It is only a matter of time, I believe, before we realise that we have talked enough, that we understand each other, and that we have reached a level of collective awareness which leads us to the step from dialogue to concerted action.
In Amsterdam, Spaces at the Herengracht, We Are The Farm held a pilot event: The Farm Feeds The City. Here 4 entrepreneurs pitched their concepts, and a building full of professionals, investors, and entrepreneurs worked together to help them grow on their essential questions. It was fun, challenging, valueble, and energising, so I expect we will have more of them.
When discussing purposes in life amongst the partners of The Farm we came to the conclusion that despite our very different roots and expertise we share a concern with the new economy. Not that we like it, or want to be part of it, but we all see the need to leave a definitive and meaningful footprint on its development. One vehicle will be The Farm Inc. At the conception of this initiative there is an evolving philosophy which reframes our understanding of what it means to be shareholder, which reframes the service economy, leadership, social change, the use of media and branding, and of course the finance industry.
Sustainability is a word that no longer covers the developments, and neither do corporate social responsibility, or social innovation.
We need to think forward in this, not backward. Sounds obvious, is not so obvious. Rather than aiming our energies on protecting and compensating for the better of the world, which are obviously admirable activities, we think it is time to find ways of stimulating a long term approach to growth which creates new roads. New relationships, technologies, and attitudes make the problems of today irrelevant.
We still need to work with the world as it is however. Innovation is not the same as new ideas. We need to make new ideas useful for old things, that is what value creation means. Ruud Koornstra said at The Farm Feeds The City that we are with one leg in the new economy, but need to push of from the old economy, which is quicksand. New ways are always in tension, AND NEED TO BE, with existing structures.
New for The Farm means novel ways of value creation.
A few new attitudes are needed for that. One of these attitudes needs to be an integrated one. The western paradigm shifts from a paradoxical specialised and fragmented centralisation to an integrated and interconnected decentralisation. Books like ‘elementary particles’ by Michel Houellebecq point to a cultural and social psychological need for reconnection and individual moving space, whereas uninvolved outsourced expertise, and trends towards decentralised responsibility indicate the same frame on an organisational level. It is the task of new initiatives to reconnect people while empowering their individual responsibility (ability to respond/act). Integration here means integrating autonomy and sharing.
It is also the task of these initiatives to integrate money and value/meaning. Since the invention of capitalism money has devaluated things by giving them a price tag. The significance of labour, products, and experiences gets lost this way which is why we are looking for meaning. The meaning of life, the meaning of my work, etc. Meaning is a product of the things you do with involvement, dare I say passion. It involves thinking, talking, and walking.
So we create capital with our imagination and labour, and when this capital grows we use a representation for its abstract value of that capital in the form of money. So money represents the abstract value which our imagination and labour bring into the economic process. The Farm set out to take a broader view on what value really is, and how it is created. meaning that business no longer needs to revolve entirely around the abstract represenation of one particular kind of value we call money.
At PICNIC this year in Amsterdam, a world wide crowd of innovators came together to share.
I held a workshop on leadership in the 21st Century with Cool Politics because I believe the influence mass collaboration in arts and media is expanding rapidly while political systems are not ready to embrace this development.
Picnic stage
We sat together with social entrepreneurs and creative thinkers to reshape democracy and rethink the roles of the citizen, state, market, and media.
Mads Kjaer kicked off this debate and lunchsession. He is co-founder of MyC4, ‘the Amazon.com of microfinance’. And by the end of the day we left with an impressive amount of ways in which our political system and its leadership will change over the next decade or so.
Powerlunch
‘Wie is er eigenlijk nog voor democratie? De vormen en de constraints van de natiestaat in welfare-verpakking zitten nog steeds vol goede bedoelingen. Maar vaak wel bedoelingen, vormen en constraints van zo rond 1955. Burgers laten op allerlei manieren merken dat dit model van democratie eigenlijk nauwelijks nog over henzelf gaat. En de politici maar hartstochtelijk en wanhopig proberen weer ‘in contact met burgers’ te komen. Hillary Clinton noemde haar campagne ‘a listening tour’ en Jan Peter Balkenende in 2007 begon te regeren met 100 dagen luisteren via een bustournee.
Kan dat niet directer, eigentijdser en hoogwaardiger? Hoe zou je een redesign voor de 21e eeuw van democratie durven maken? Een internationale groep creatieven en eigenwijzen tussen 20 en 65 deed op Picnic een gooi naar deze macht. Een soort coup d’état van de geest, een virtuele staatsgreep.’ lees verder
