Thomas Schuurmans

Background

About Thomas Schuurmans

The new normal? Living in a world where the economy is about offering 'meaningful' products and services designed for improving people's quality of life. That is the new normal I envision. We work hard to make that happen. ProPortion offers human-centered design and venture building support to NGOs, social businesses and corporates who aim to impact low-income communities. We support them in innovating new services, products and business models and build social impact ventures. Our methodology combines human-centered design and lean start-up. A key success is to have great empathy for the people you want to design a solution for. Through qualitative research, we gain a deep understanding of people's needs, aspirations and constraints to generate rich insights. We turn those insights into ideas, in co-creation with the customer segments and other system actors. We prototype the most promising ideas to get user feedback as soon as possible, to learn and pivot, till we get it right. This includes validation of revenue models, marketing and pricing, in order to create viable innovations. Over the last 11 years, we have enriched our skills & knowledge base through getting our hands dirty in the field in co-creating new innovations with and for low-income communities in South Asia, Africa and South America. We are passionate and highly motivated to share our experience with others to speed up the mainstreaming of such social entrepreneurial industry & venture building. For that reason, we have launched the Proportion Academy whereby local instructors around the world train and coach aspiring entrepreneurs in building ventures.