The Digital Thinking Network: Thought Leadership in Futures Thinking

For more than two decades the Digital Thinking Network has been facilitating scenario, leadership and innovation processes to a diverse body of clients across 4 continents. It has worked with a range of private and public sector clients including Central Banks, Shell, Rabobank, Schlumberger, Telenor, Vodafone, Mitsubishi Sumitomo Insurance, Sanoma, American Tower, Nokia, the City Rotterdam, the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, -Economic Affairs, -Spatial Planning, etc. 

Notable successes in the private sector:

• A strategic acquisition resulting from a DTN scenario planning process created € 350 million profit in 3 years- a 10X return on investment. 
• The DTN anticipated the 2008 global financial crisis (in early 2006) for a bank allowing it remain in it members’ hands and secure a $2.5B profit, its largest in a 150 year history in 2008.  The case is described in the book that also anticipated the FinTech revolution: [The Future of ICT in Financial Services]
• DTN scenarios and NewsConsole/ Erasmus.io analytics anticipated the 2014 Oil Price Collapse for a leading Oil Field Supplier in 2011/12- informing a $30 billion merger using NewsConsole as an Early Learning System.

In public sector transformation for the City of Rotterdam in 2004 the DTN designed the process for the Economic Development Board and created and facilitated the International Advisory Board that lead to the groundbreaking initiative to half Rotterdam’s CO2 emissions by 2025 and to become the number one intercultural city in Europe.

As input to these scenarios the DTN has conducted more than 1000 high level multi-hour video interviews with global thought leaders from inventors of the Internet Vint Cerf & Bob Kahn; founder of e-commerce giant Rakuten Shinnosuke Honjo; to Nobel Laureates George Akerlof and James Mirrlees; to author of the Club of Rome Limits to Growth Jorgen Randers; climate scientist and NASA Goddard Head- Jim Hansen; to USA’s most accomplished astronaut Story Musgrave; to Under Secretary of the DoD/ Dept of Education; to CEO of SWIFT Gottfried Leibbrandt, CEO of Tata Natarajan Chandrasekaran; to one of the sushi masters of the Emperor of Japan Eiji Sato-Oyakata and HRH Prince Carlos de Bourbon de Parne, etc.  DTN principal Daniel Erasmus has written three books describing scenario processes, as well as a redesign of Shell’s breakthrough innovation process GameChanger.