Video-interview: Redefining a good life, from the crib to the grave

During the Creative Bureaucracy Festival++Creative Bureaucracy Festival The festival celebrates outstanding innovation in the public sector and its contribution to a better, more sustainable, and more just world. It brings together bureaucrats and their allies – those who, at all levels of government, fight for the common good and make a difference. They want to cultivate a more positive attitude towards the public sector as well as more drive and eagerness to experiment within the public sector. In 2021 there were 400 international speakers and 18.000 visitors. The next edition will take place between 30 May and 3 June 2022. Read more, Kennisland director Nora van der Linden was interviewed by Charles Landry, an international authority on the use of imagination and creativity in the context of urban change. Nora talked about the origins of Kennisland and how we have transformed over the past twenty years into a think and do tank that tackles complex social issues together with those directly involved. Based on three of our projects – Our New School, Living a Whole Life and the Living Lab Reporting Muslim Discrimination – she gives an insight into how we achieve a trickle-up effect with the help of design thinking.

This is how the Creative Bureaucracy Festival announced us:

“Kennisland was founded in 1999 and is a pioneer in social innovation. Increasingly it has evolved to being more than a think tank.“Kennisland was founded in 1999 and is a pioneer in social innovation. Increasingly it has evolved to being more than a think tank.” Its initial goal was to put the Netherlands on the map as a knowledge economy. One issue it focused on early was how to make government more efficient and in 2006 set up the beautiful named Kafka Brigade, which later became independent. It sought out and tackled unnecessary and dysfunctional bureaucracy in government. Now Kennisland tackles complex social problems and we hear about three of their many more recent projects from Nora van der Linden. They are: Rethinking what a school can be or what an elderly care home can become and finally how to increase the willingness to report discrimination among the Muslim community. A challenge for Kennisland having been a pioneer for so long – how can they maintain the momentum.

The Kennisland team also ran an interactive session in the ‘Core Competencies’ track of our Academy: ‘Breaking the Glass Ceiling for Creative Solutions’.

Nora van der Linden is a senior social innovation advisor and Kennisland’s director. She develops new approaches, strategies and interventions for complex social problems. Nora has a great deal of practical experience, which she is able to harness to solve the challenges of the public realm and devise systematic solutions. For her, one question always comes first: how can you make the people affected by problems part of the solution?“For Nora, one question always comes first: how can you make the people affected by problems part of the solution?” And how can you subsequently use those solutions to change policy, procedures and rules such that people’s lives improve and society becomes more equal?

Charles Landry is an international authority on the use of imagination and creativity in urban change. He is best known for having invented the concept of the Creative City in the late 1980s. Its focus is how cities can create the enabling conditions for people and organizations to think, plan and act with imagination to solve problems and develop opportunities. The notion has become a global movement and changed the way cities thought about their capabilities and resources.”

• KL'ers involved
• Nora van der Linden nl@kl.nl