Living change!

Here’s a short update about what is happening with FreeUp. Lots of newness and change! And no time to write. In the co-creation team new moms and dads appeared, as children were born. There was house hunting, renovating, and moving house. And changes of office space. All together quite some intensity, resulting in new circumstances, new connections and fresh perspectives. FreeUp now shares an office with Thijs Mullink, treasurer and co-founder of Music &Memory, a non-profit helping people struggling from dementia through personalized digital music playlists, delivered on iPods and other...

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Smart City beyond the buzz

‘Smart City’ appears to be a key concept when it comes to building cities of the future. But it is not easy to understand what it is. It has something to do with ‘IoT’ (Internet of Things), with digital transformation, with resource management, with citizen engagement; and with many other things… “Ask a hundred government officials, senior corporate executives or investors what a smart city is and you will probably get a different answer each time. We believe each city should define its own smart city.” (Osborne Clarke 2015) In the past year I’ve been involved in several projects and learned...

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A new year, new opportunities, fresh perspectives!

We wish you creative flow, positive energy, growth and wakefulness in 2018! While discovering, innovating, co-creating the new. From the heart, Liesbeth & the co-creation team  

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Other world, this world

Sometimes it is important to see the world in a new light. To help us imagine how and what the future might be like, it is possible to use Virtual Reality (VR) or Augmented Reality (AR) to get a sense of new possibilities. VR has a dreamlike quality, getting into another zone, discovering what is in there, sometimes hidden, sometimes like a game. Of course, these zones do not come from nowhere, they have been created and programmed, to trick our minds into an illusion that helps us see a different kind of reality. However, the headset largely isolates you from the real world. Augmented...

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Citizen City – empower to co-create future cities

At FreeUp, we do quite some work with and for city governments. More and more cities face challenges that can not be solved in isolation. There is a need for engaging with society to create our cities’ futures. To find ways to tackle the challenges, cooperation is needed, not only with businesses and knowledge parters, but especially also with citizens. “Successful cities will be designed around the needs and desires of increasingly empowered and enabled citizens – who are expecting personalized services from the organisations that serve them.” (Future Agenda) FreeUp is involved in an...

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Visual storytelling for ‘testing the future’

In strategic projects, we try to make a bridge from now to a desirable future. The bridge tends to consist of ideas and concepts on how to get to that future. Often we call this a roadmap. Obviously, in a commercial context, it is key to involve customers in the making of a roadmap. Especially in business-to-business, you would like them to continue to be your customers in the future. Customer conversations can be carried out to explore their emerging needs and the future challenges they foresee. This will give you insight into your potential future business with them. Through a creative...

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