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Vision & Approach

As an innovation partner, Club van Delft engages in long-term cooperation with organizations and businesses in the Netherlands, Europe and the world. Its activities are aimed at a high level of services in which increasing the innovative capabilities of the client is the biggest priority.

Our experiences in these processes have helped us established these three fundamental points of our approach:

• Creativity is not something exclusively for ‘creative people’ – on the contrary: in a properly structured process it is possible for everyone to think out of the box. It is possible to train yourself in ‘creative’ thinking.
• Innovation = Open – innovation processes are rarely successful if they are only aimed at the interior or exterior of the company. Combining an external view, embracing developments outside of the company, with the situation within the company results in successful changes.
• Fresh perspective + experience – - …are often hard to unite in one person and/or team. That is why we unite the fresh and creative perspective of young professionals with that of able and experienced employees of our clients.

We elaborate on this under this line.

Innovation.
There is (a little too) much writing about innovation. Innovation is a ‘mindset’ of people within the organization and an attitude of the company in itself. The employees within an organization need to be positive about changes and the company has to be open to internal and external developments. The most important thing is that they realize that an innovation process does not always lead to a huge success. Hence why it is important to ‘aim to fail’. If initiatives are allowed to fail employees will feel much more free to experiment and explore non-conventional options.

Creativity is not magic
Our apologies go out to creative agencies that like to tell their clients that creativity is something that you either have or do not. Some people are more creative than others and seem to have a talent for this. The idea that creative thinking is exclusive to people that have this talent is, however, doubtful. Club van Delft uses very practical methods in order to stimulate creativity in individuals and groups.

‘Serious Creativity’
Club van Delft started within the Delft University of Technology. The engineering subjects often focus on rationality and analysis. Several other faculties combine these analytical skills with creativity. This background and combination of qualities forms the basis for the approach taken by Club van Delft. We call this ‘serious creativity’. Analysis and creativity strengthen eachother.

External Think Power
Club van Delft offers ThinkTanks to businesses. A ThinkTank consists of young, ambitious academics working under high pressure. Club van Delft has years of experience in supervising this process. The young professionals have the perfect combination of skills, without the trepidation that years of working in the field can produce. Because they work together with professionals from the client’s organization, the experience is present, but it does not initially determine the outcome.

Not crowd sourcing, but elitesourcing
The power of crowdsourcing lies in the combined efforts of a large group – the crowd. This crowd aims at resolving a certain problem and generates (often online) a set of solutions. This is viable for some problems, but the solutions tend to become lacking in the amount of depth required. The crowd cannot produce a ‘miracle solution’ out of more complex problems. Aside from that, an organization might be hesitant to share all their challenges with the public (and its competitors).

Club van Delft replaces the crowd with a talented ThinkTank that, due to its shared expertise, can accomplish much more. The ThinkTank meets with the client physically, which means that ThinkTank can use an interactive environment to explore new depths of the problem. Where crowdsourcing limited itself to individuals solving the problems, interaction within the ThinkTank at these meetings leads to better concepts.