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Innovation

For innovation, diverse perspectives are essential. We help brands break free from old thinking patterns and infuse human needs into their ideas. By grasping the underlying human needs in your industry’s trends, you unlock fresh ways to fulfill them. This leads to new product and service innovations aligned with your brand and customers. Whether guiding full innovation processes or integrating with existing methods, we drive human-centric ideation and validation.

What we do:

  • Design sprints & innovation workshops
  • Scenario planning
  • Building future labs
  • Develop new value propositions
  • Building foresight capability

Challenges

"Develop disruptive products and services for specific target groups"

"Develop & guide our yearly innovation program"

"Identify and advice on how to respond to what vulnerable groups"

"Help us discover trends that fuel innovation and human-proof our product roadmap"

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People expect brands to be relevant and add meaning to their lives.

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Brand direction
& strategy

Marketing
& Communication

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Brand direction
& strategy

Marketing
& Communication

Organization
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Kees Elands

Founder & Strategist

Kees Elands

Founder & Strategist

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Kim Pillen

Consultant

Before Kim Pillen started as a trend consultant at TrendsActive, she worked for four years as a creative strategist at Dept. For brands such as Philips, bol.com, Beiersdorf, JBL, and the Consumers’ Association, she built (online) campaign, brand, and social media strategies. After four years, she decided that she wanted to better understand people and society in order to advise brands more effectively. That’s how she ended up at TrendsActive. Here, she can do what she loves most: digging into people’s needs and then working with brands to see how and where they can be relevant and meaningful.

Douwe Knijff

Researcher

Douwe is fascinated by how people work. With a background in Interdisciplinary Social Sciences (Bachelor) and Psychology (Master) and an analytical mind he tries figure out how societal shifts manifest themselves through social culture and human behaviour.

Aljan De Boer

Keynote speaker

Aljan has been widely recognized as an inspiring professional speaker on the critical trends that will shape society in the decades to come. He works as the Head of Inspiration at TrendsActive, a trend consultancy from the Netherlands using social science to human-proof business decision for brands like

  • Disney
  • Vodafone
  • Hugo Boss
  • ASR
  • Rabobank

Next to his role at TrendsActive he is the Community Director at the Institute for Real Growth where he inspires and connects a global community of +400 CMOs.  

He has been on the board of the Dutch Platform of Innovative Marketing for almost a decade. Regular speaker and moderator for the Dutch Marketing Awards and 3 times winner of the best of MIE. 

Kees Elands

Founder & Strategist

Kees his purpose is to help ambitious leaders and brands to human-proof their business. In 2003 he founded TrendsActive, a trend consultancy enabling brands to become more human centric.

Kees consults global brands like

  • Disney
  • The Coca-Cola Company
  • Asics
  • Discovery Channel
  • Swiss Life
  • Vodafone

and many more.

Next to being the founder of TrendsActive, he is also initiator of the first academic trend master for executives at the University of Utrecht and is initiator of various trend studies and white papers on subjects like trust, meaning, visual culture & generations.