This is a CTP of initiative: Impact Hub Amsterdam (Netherlands)
At the end of 2013, The Hub Amsterdam was rebranded as Impact Hub Amsterdam. This was part of a broader GLOBAL REBRANDING process. The local rebranding also coincided with the RELOCATION to the Westerpark. The local rebranding was an important element in distinguishing the Impact Hub Amsterdam from other similar initiatives. As described by a team member of the local Impact Hub: “The addition of Impact in our name really came because actually it was what we were always about already (…). I think at that time when we started, there weren’t that many other initiatives happening or co-working spaces or communities in that sense, but now they are popping up. We feel [more] strongly about making that societal impact.” (Interviewee 4 as quoted in Wittmayer et al. 2015).
At the beginning, the practices of The Hub Amsterdam had been mainly aimed at providing their members adequate services for their practices and to develop a co-creative environment in which the members could provide each other with knowledge and services. The rebranding into an Impact Hub provided the opportunity to further develop and realign with a shared vision. There was a desire among the co-founders to develop incubation and acceleration programs that could provide start-ups with the appropriate knowledge and insights to take their business to the next level. Besides this focus on the individual enterprises and supporting them in a much more active way, the co-founders felt that the Impact Hub could do more than just provide these services to their members. As co-founder 2 indicates: “The Hub is not just a space, it’s also an incubator, an accelerator and a consultancy on social innovation problems. We’ve gotten excited by that idea and we regrouped as a founders teams to build the next level of our Hub”.
This was a process in which The Hub needed to be reinvented, and the co-founders, as well as the members and the staff needed to refigure and re-present themselves in such a way that they could serve the demands and objectives that this new Hub aimed to construct itself around. In a nutshell, local rebranding represents the materialization of the ambition to move from a space membership based business model, to a more service and program oriented business model. The Impact Hub can now be seen as an ‘ecosystem’ for innovation and tackling problems that can be addressed with social entrepreneurship, rather than a location in which various enterprises run their daily operations.
Given the context of the GLOBAL REBRANDING of the entire network, the local rebranding process at the Impact Hub Amsterdam was directly and indirectly co-produced with the global network and all the other Impact Hubs in it. At the local level, it was mostly the co-founders and management team that guided the rebranding process. However, the process of re-defining new aims and objectives that shaped the new character of the Impact Hub Amsterdam, these were co-created with the whole team, including the members, the advisory board and the financers. This was a process of many different meetings, with different people who all had a different relation to the Impact Hub. Co-founder 2 recalls: “It is not that we presented ‘this is what we are going to do’. It was more like ‘Hey guys, this is our idea, what do you think about it, how and where do you want to go?’ So it was a co-creative process, rather than presenting it as ‘this is it and you don’t have a say in it’”.
The initial initiative for developing what co-founder 2 calls the next level Hub, and for consequently putting the wheels in motion for the re-branding, came from the three co-founders. Next to the three co-founders, there were others who were involved in the management and communication of and around the Impact Hub Amsterdam. Besides this core group, the members and the shareholders also played a role in the rebranding. As co-founder 2 describes it: “We invited them into a process of co-creation. So we had a basic skeleton and direction where we wanted to go, but then we wanted to make sure we had proper backup of both our shareholders and our community”.
The global rebranding was officially implemented on the 1st of September 2013. The re-branding of The Hub Amsterdam to Impact Hub Amsterdam was first communicated a few days later on the 6th of September 2013. There was a strong relation between the re-branding and the relocation to Westerpark: “The Impact Hub branding was synchronized with the turning point of the relocation” (co-founder 2). Before relocating to the Westerpark (see CTP RELOCATION), there were several events to involve staff, community members and shareholders, including meetings to co-create the new space and the re-branding. The new brand was widely communicated to the outside world during the open launch party of the new location, which coincided with 5th year anniversary on 21st of November 2013.
Before the whole relocation and rebranding process, there was a retreat of the core team in April 2012. At this retreat, the core team came up with a new skeleton and outline of the vision and direction for the development of the Impact Hub Amsterdam. For example, co-founder 2 recalls that during that meeting they made a drawing of a Roman house, where there were spaces, events and the community as the stairs. The pillars of the building would be constructed of education, acceleration and collaboration, all to reach impact, which was the roof of the building. This outline was used in the co-creation processes for the re-branding and re-location. “In our retreat we came with our ambition to move from a space membership based business model to a more service and program oriented business model. We realized that it’s nice to have all these social entrepreneurs at one space but we could do much more for them” (co-founder 2).
It was only after that retreat that the team found out about the global rebranding, which was communicated and discussed during a global gathering in London in April 2013. The core team of the Hub Amsterdam felt that the global rebranding towards Impact Hub, fitted with their prior ideas about developing their local hub to a next level. As such, the timing of the global rebranding was very much in line with their relocation: “Not everybody [other hubs in the network] had the same luck as we had; the brand change really happened at the moment that we had to relocate. (…) the rebranding happened in September 2013 and that was exactly when we had the space ready to be furnished and ready to be moved in. So for us it was perfect (…) it was really really a nice coincidence” (co-founder 2).
There were struggles as the result of the fact that the co-founders had put too much on their own plates. Besides developing new programs for the Impact Hub, there was also the daily running and operation of the Hub, and the preparations for the relocation. There were three very big programs running at the same time, which were equally important for the future of the community. As co-founder 2 formulates: “the struggle was doing everything together at the same time and that was difficult. At some point, [we the co-founders] had to do most of it because we were the leaders of this next level business”. It was not just that these things had to happen at the same time, it was also that they took the responsibility for it, and therefore it almost became too much.
Furthermore, the re-branding had an effect on the composition of the community, and consequently the new character of the community was influenced by some contestations and struggles with old and new members. According to co-founder 2 this is a logical development in every organization: “With every change in your organization you lose people who say ‘yes I liked the other place’ and who say ‘I don’t want to change, don’t want to move’. So in that process we lost a few, but not as much as we thought, and then we had a lot of new ones coming for the new space”.
In a strict sense, the actual rebranding was only anticipated at the global gathering in London in the spring of 2013. However, there had been prior meetings at the local levels, to imagine the future of The Hub. Co-founder 2 indicates that they had always imagined that The Hub would continue to grow, but until the first version of the Hub (at the Westerstraat) was finished and materialized, they could not oversee the impact and success that their Hub would have. Therefore, the co-founders could only dream or imagine where The Hub would go in the future, but they could not foresee the success and growth of a Hub 2.0 version.
During the actual process of re-branding and the actual build up to this moment, there are many leads that the co-founders were in a sense anticipating different scenarios. For example, already one year before the actual move and re-branding, they were focused on the processes that could help them with developing a next level Hub. They also saw that it was possible for them to re-focus on their initial roles as co-founders, after they had hired professional staff for the daily operations. Co-founder 2 reports: “Until you build 1.0 you just don’t know what is going to happen after. So once we had 1.0, we realized ‘Is that it, really? No that can’t be it, there is more’. (…) We never really predicted ourselves in the future as such, because we were very in the present moment and really building what was relevant then".
The first lesson that is mentioned in relation to this CTP, is that ‘nothing is impossible’, given the relative success of both the re-branding and the re-location happening at the same time. In order to deal with the struggles and contestations that were inherently part of this process, the team had to have a high level of determination, a clear incentive to continue and not give up.
Co-founder 2 acknowledges that in this case it would have been helpful to have a bit more capacity in terms of having more staff who can support and take over responsibilities: “We wanted to do everything ourselves because we had limited capacity and limited resources to do so. We did everything ourselves. So if you know that this is happening, if you can build more resources and capacity; that would be a lot smarter and wiser and would offer a process that’s a bit smoother”. An important lesson learnt concerns the redistribution of tasks so that daily operations could still run smoothly without being affected by contestations around different developments. In this case, all tasks and developments were running through each other, which made the already difficult process even more difficult to implement.
Another useful insight from the shareholder is focused on “the importance of the human relations in the team”, and how this relates to a transition period like the rebranding and relocation: “Even though you kind of get on well initially, when you are in that high level energy start- up phase and move from the entrepreneurial phase into the management phase, it requires different skills and energy. That means that you need to put your nose to the grindstone and run the organization, which is not everybody’s cup of tea. Some people are more on setting up the concept and other people are better at managing something. So that’s the important transition, and it tests the relationships in the team. Important in that stage is having conversations about your energy and whether you are enjoying it or not, what role you really liked playing and what not. And those can be difficult when you have people in the start-up phase who aren’t necessarily suited for that moving into a more management phase. The best thing then is just to move on, but you can be quite attached to the baby you’ve created. So, it’s really important to have quality people to show up and engage with each other beyond the roles that they are playing”.
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