Niels Dengel
– Personal Development

Niels works as a business coach, personal coach and facilitator. He was inspired to start his own business after working for Google for six years. He believes that any change an organization has to go through is the work of people. “By focusing on the people of an organization these changes happen more effectively, more surprising and run more smoothly. Minkowski for me is the ideal approach for collaboration. A group of highly qualified people with various expertise and skills forms a customized team that is fit for the challenge of the organization that engages with us. The value added per team member is immediately clear. There are no hidden agendas just the desire to be more than just the sum of each of us individually. I believe that the impact that we generate under these circumstances is the biggest as can be”.

Margriet Larmit –
Strategy Design

Margriet is a skilled innovation and concept designer. She is driven by the idea that impact and change can be created by using design and the force of collective creativity and intelligence. Her strength is reaching innovative insights through creative thinking. Margriet is known for her enthusiasm in connecting people around specific actionable goals. She is skilled in going from idea to implementation. Together with her clients, she helps organizations sharpen their ideas and turn them into concepts that create real impact, she also supervises the implementation of these concepts to assure they are successful.

“With Minkowski, I have a valuable cooperation with likeminded and skilled people, that together can really make a difference to my clients’ needs and wishes. It’s not that hard to start the conversation on how to innovate, the trick is in connecting the dots in the organisation, so innovation takes place in several areas, with several teams steering the same boat. Facilitating that kind of innovation is something we need to co-create together.”

Jörgen
van der Sloot
– Founder

Jörgen is the founding member of Minkowski. He’s helped numerous organizations to get breakthroughs in their thinking and in their perspective on the world. He has collaborated with many internationally operating organizations in the fields of media and consumer brands, finance and investment, insurance and pensions, education and charity and has hosted sessions for groups ranging in size from 3 people to 300 people, from boardroom to classroom.

“I love designing our programs and approaches to make change last. I have a great passion for facilitating groups and coaching some facilitators and moderators as well as some innovation teams for our clients. I’ve founded Minkowski because I don’t think there is just one way to make change last. The collaboration between all the members of Minkowski and the sharing of tools and methodology as well as experience and skills creates an inspiring environment where we are all learning how best to help a particular organization. I don’t believe in old organizational structures that exploit employees. Minkowski to me is a great way of discovering how to create a sustainable collective for the future”.

Alexandre Janssen –
Co-Founder

Alexandre has over ten years of experience in applying innovation within organizations; whether is about the structure, the KPI’s, the process or the people and the cultural element. His broad experience in facilitating ideation, innovation, business model and scaling workshops for larger organization combined with his role as an advisor and investor in several startups, provides him with a broad view and expertise on the topic on innovation & intrapreneurship. He has talked at TEDx, gives guest lectures at different universities and is a frequent keynote speaker and facilitator for groups ranging from 10 to 600 people.

“Within Minkowski, not only do I design and facilitate (online) sessions, I’m also there to ensure the organization is running smoothly. I work with our associates to ensure we make a long-lasting impact in the organization”.

Rolinka Kattouw
Creative Strategist

Rolinka is a creative strategist and facilitator. She has over 20 years of experience working on wicked problems with corporates, government and non-profits. Her latest challenge evolves improving the lives of the people in Amsterdam, going the extra mile after her impressive research on the digital divide and poverty. She believes good design has an impact and all impact starts with a clear challenge. Her contribution to making an impact is in designing and facilitating a structured creative process, connecting clients to the world of their customers, employees or partners. She is an experienced design thinker, using solid methods and enabling learning by doing. Co-creative collaboration with customer teams, experts or stakeholders is central in creating value and key in my approach.

“I see Minkowski as an ecosystem of experts. We compose the team that fits best thus enabling organisations to set a direction for the future and make it happen. Working with a great mix of personalities, experience and knowledge trigger my learning and growth, both as a person and professionally. Being the senior professionals we are, we not only value quality but also fun and laughter in our work!”

Joris Ankersmit
USA

Joris has a background working in various industries in a business management and change management capacity. He has worked on large and small transformation programs and has experience with preparing organizations for changes that greatly impact the status quo. His work has taken him across the globe and exposed him to many different cultures and ways of working that benefits the design thinking at the heart of Minkowski.

“I love to build communities that bring together individuals with different backgrounds, views and ideas. The years working in a corporate environment helps me translate the Minkowski principles into organisational practice. While my time running a lifestyle brand brings an entrepreneurial focus to the table. In my spare time, I am a kiteboard instructor and teach martial arts in Central Park. When it comes to co-creating applied futures I like to use the analogy of a fight. A fighter needs to be aware of the surroundings, know his/her own strengths and weaknesses and anticipate the future. To come out on top a fighter needs to adapt, face difficult challenges, stay calm under duress and continuously change “the now”. However the fighter should not try too hard to win and be exposed, but stay ahead of the opponent and strike when it is most optimal. Sounds familiar?
For Minkowski, i’m exploring opportunities to apply its proven methodologies in the USA and expand in other markets.”

Jeroen van Mastrigt –
Strategy

Jeroen has been working on the development of innovation related vison & strategy and creating innovative services for companies in a broad range of sectors (tech, media, leisure, traveling, building & real estate, finance, energy and athe cultural & creative sectors). Jeroen challenges organizations with state of the art, cross sectoral insights from the field of applied technology, and human agency. He is able to make sense of a changing world, by not only understanding cross sectoral developments & contexts but also to creatively translate generated insights into clear and applicable strategies and concepts.

“In these past years I have learned that Minkowski’s methods and facilitation capabilities are key in starting successful innovation trajectories: defining a shared vision and position in relation to an organization’s future in the light of technological change, fuelled methods that facilitate bottom up co-creation.”

Herman Weeda
– Visual Facilitation

As a strategic designer and visual storyteller, Herman combines his design thinking expertise and strong visualisation skills with his experience of facilitating numerous co-creation workshops, projects and processes. “Within Minkowski I apply my skills to break down complex problems into clear visuals, which we then use to build new (visual) concepts, stories and strategies together with our clients and partners. Being part of Minkowski offers me the change to work with a team of enthusiastic, highly skilled people on grand challenges with clients that can make an impact. For me, bringing in the visual dimension is important, because I believe that creating a better world starts with imagining it”.

Feikje Dunnewijk
– Leadership Development

Feikje is a facilitator and executive coach with 20 years of experience in developing people, teams and organizations to be ready for tomorrow. Besides her experience as a global HR director role in the fashion industry, in the MRO business, she has over 10 years of experience in financial services in various senior leadership roles in HR. Throughout the years she specialized in leadership and transformation and coached senior executives, teams and organizations in their business challenges. Her practical business experience and knowledge of leadership and transformation are blended with her coaching skills.

“At Minkowski we bring different ways of thinking together. An effecting way of approaching change and use the wisdom in the room. I believe in order to change you need to look at yourself from the outside instead of look at the world from the inside. I love provoking leaders, team and organizations in times of change to challenge their belief system and allow new thinking.

I’m passioned to make change and transformation easier for companies and leaders in order to be ready for the future.”

Florine van Wulfften Palthe
– Consumer Experience

Florine facilitates organizations and teams in getting to their business and product outcomes faster while optimizing the value they deliver to customers and employees. She does this by training and coaching a human-centred and entrepreneurial design process, and by creating a culture for innovation.

“Being part of Minkowski allows me to have an impact on organization transformations on a larger scale, and to tackle this from different angles by working together with a wide range of expertise. Collaboration does not only lead to better quality and more learnings, but also more fun! In working together with Minkowski, my goal is to ensure our clients are future ready on all levels within the organization”.

Bart Jan van ‘t Hoff –
Leadership / Coaching

As an executive coach and facilitator Bart Jan supports leaders and executive teams in sustainable and impactful transformation through system change, team dialogue, nature trails and executive coaching. Bart Jan combines his background in executive search and leadership development with an entrepreneurial mindset; driven to find the hidden potential in humans and organisations.

Enabling growth through raising consciousness on what is holding people and organisations back from the future potential gives me energy. I see Minkowski as a community of people that is always looking for that future potential, by bringing different ideas together and acting upon does ideas.

Femke Lans –
Customer Experience Designer

Benjamin Willemsen –
Junior Researcher

Benjamin is a master’s student Business Administration from the University of Amsterdam and is currently doing a research project for Minkowski. The focus in his study is what the impact of future thinking is on the innovative work behavior of participants. By assessing the tools and techniques, such as stories for change, he will seek for a better understanding of the impact Minkowski’s programs have on organizations.

As a final-stage master student with limited experience in innovation, Minkowski gives me the opportunity to see what innovations actually entails in real life. All the associates of Minkowski are highly passionate and experienced in the field, which gives me a great possibility to learn, observe and question them about innovation. I hope that at the end of this cooperation, I will have a clear view on the value of innovation in organizations and in turn that my research will be of a great value for Minkowski’s future.

Adipat Virdi –
Strategic Narrative

Adipat studied Architecture and practiced socio-spatial analysis before changing career to focus on creative strategy and experience design. Having studied at both Oxford and Cambridge, Adipat has qualifications that include an MBA and MA’s in Design Strategy and Innovation, Advanced Architectural Studies and Screenwriting. Key areas of expertise are in audience engagement strategy, organisational behaviour mechanics, strategic narrative thinking and experience design and measurement to provide innovative and effective solutions to complex problems.

“I hope to bring creative and critical thinking to Minkowski, in order to facilitate more effective dialogue and the emergence of meaningful experiences.”

Herman Knevel –
Innovation

Derk Schneemann –
Innovation Strategy

Derk is an innovator and a strategic thinker at heart. He’s a creative leader with a strong background in innovation, business & client management, marketing & communication. He has structured and coached smaller teams (10-40 people) to help them develop new propositions. The last decade Derk has been directly involved in setting up start-ups, scale-ups and has been facilitating corporates in innovation strategy and innovation thinking.

“I love to design and facilitate training-programmes and advise on innovation, strategy and ‘start-up’ topics. The unique combination of talent, skill and methodology at Minkowski inspires me continuously and stimulates me to push my own boundaries. In my experience innovation and transformation should always be done with people instead of for them. That’s where my philosophy and that of Minkowski align: I love to make history by changing the future with organisations”

Hajo van Beijma
– Business Development

Hajo is the COO of SingularityU Benelux. He is an entrepreneur by heart and experience. “We have a strong bond with Minkowski as they are our partner to help our clients and participants in programs translate the insights from an exponentially changing world to their own lives. As a representative of SingularityU Benelux, I am often part of the team that is specifically designed around the challenges our clients face. My goal with Minkowksi is to impact the lives of a billion people worldwide and to make the impact that we have last”.

Diederick Croese –
Co-Founder

You?

Feel like you can contribute to our programs as well? Drop us a line at hello@minkowski.org and we can have a chat!