Simone Poutnik – Founding Partner
Simone is a curator and facilitator of innovation ecologies and labs. Her specialty is helping unlikely allies collaborate towards a shared purpose and find synergy in complexity. Her experience is founded in ten years of working in diverse contexts around the world.
She has worked with the European Union Institutions to improve stakeholder engagement for strategy and policy development and participatory leadership development. She helped catalize the social innovation eco-system in the civil society movements in post-revolutionary Egypt. She facilitated conversations about climate change at COP15 in Copenhagen, worked with various companies on collaborative design challenges and on creating thriving communities in Northern Kenya and Zimbabwe. Previous to Natural Innovation she co-founded the Hub Brussels – an incubator and co-working space for social impact, and Tasting the Future – a community of practitioners working towards a sustainable food system in the UK.
Simone is part of the global Art of Hosting community for which she has co-developed a global story-mapping platform and recently the first ever advanced practice online course. Simone has also been a member of the FoAM Lab Brussels – an art and technology lab – and board member of The Hub World.
She has significant experience working in inter-cultural contexts and many different countries including Italy, India, Belgium, Germany, the UK, the US, Ireland, Poland, Egypt, Kenya and Zimbabwe. In September 2013 she moved from Egypt to the San Francisco Bay Area.
Simone holds an MA in International Communication, specialised in Multi-stakeholder Engagement from the International University of Perugia in Italy.
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Hendrik Tiesinga – Founding Partner
Hendrik is a curator, designer and facilitator of multi-stakeholder innovation labs and networks. He is a co-founder of Labcraft a global community of practice of social innovation labs. He is also the editor and producer of the Labcraft book, collaboratively written by eight labs from around the world.
Hendrik was also a co-founder of the Finance Innovation Lab in London, convened in 2008 by WWF-UK and the Institute of Chartered Accountants. He has designed and facilitated complex multi-stakeholder projects across Europe, North-America and the Arab world, working for a variety of organisations ranging from grass-roots social entrepreneurs and artists to the European Commission, the big 4 Audit Firms, Proctor & Gamble and Siemens.
Hendrik is a doctoral researcher at Warwick Business School in the UK, and currently a visiting scholar at UC, Berkeley. His research focuses on the impact and practices of innovation labs addressing complex societal challenges.
Hendrik holds a MA in Politics & Philosophy from the University of Amsterdam and a MA in Organization & Management Studies from the Warwick Business School.
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