HOW
Our interdisciplinary human-centric methodology brings together top-tier designers, developers, entrepreneurs and students from a wide range of academic fields, industries and cultures, working closely with leading organizations, and through intense collaboration and cross-pollination across disciplines.
Our uniqueness lies in our expansive process: we first begin by immersing in context-specific challenges, conducting deep research on organizational pain points, and generating human-centric prompts which frame problems without providing solutions. Next, teams build on these prompts in an expanded research process, gaining access to and cultivating relationships with crucial stakeholders. The pinnacle of this process is a multi-day ideation sprint, where teams join together for a collaborative final push to create concepts aimed at solving these problems. After, we guide select teams in their transformation from idea to startup, turning their concepts into implementable solutions ripe for organic growth.
Bridging research-to-ideation-to-implementation, MindState differentiates itself by starting its process well before and continuing long after the ideation sprint. Along the way we remain intimately involved, creating strong relationships with stakeholders, providing one-on-one mentoring to participants, and incubating select startups with vast potential.
Participants
1200
Prompts
50
Sprints
20
Countries
10
WHO
TAMAR MANY
Shenkar College of Engineering, Design and Art
Tamar Many is a senior lecturer at Shenkar College of Engineering, Design and Art, Tel Aviv University and Hong Kong University. She teaches courses in urban and health tech, visual communication, and entrepreneurship, as well as fashion, textile, environmental and industrial design. In addition to her academic roles, she is also a consultant to Cornell Tech Runway Program and Creative Advisor to several impactful startups.
Previously, Tamar founded the luxury stationery company Textured Paper, collaborating with MoMA on a special edition collection.
Tamar’s passion lies in social entrepreneurship, where she researches the intersection of design, technology and business. She is the co-founder of MindState, an organization tackling societal issues by bringing together multidisciplinary, global teams and employing their proprietary design thinking methodology. Her guiding ethos is that talent-infused situations will always produce something good.
Tamar lives in Tel Aviv, with her family, and can be regularly found at a cafe with her students developing the next innovative idea to better the world.
HENK VAN ASSEN
Yale University / Parsons School of Design / HvADESIGN
Henk van Assen graduated from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (Department of Graphic Design and Typography) in The Hague, The Netherlands, in 1989. After working several years as a graphic designer in Amsterdam, he came to the United States, where he received his M.F.A. in 1993 from Yale University.
He is founding principal of HvAD, a multi-disciplinary design studio in New York City and has overseen many projects in print, environmental, and screen-based media, ranging from book– to identity- to exhibition– to web design. Clients include Acquavella Galleries, NY; Rizzoli, NY; David Zwirner Galleries, NY; The Gego Foundation, Caracas, Venezuela; the Guggenheim Museum, NY; the Museum of the City of New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; FotoFest, Houston; the New York Public Library; Yale University Press and the Museum of Arts and Design, NY.
He has been awarded multiple awards and acknowledgments for his work.
In tandem with his studio practice, Mr. van Assen is a senior critic in graphic design at Yale University since 1999. He has also taught design at the University of Texas, at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Since 2012, he is a lecturer at Parsons The New School for Design. Additionally, he regularly conducts workshops internationally, most recently in Shanghai, China, Tel Aviv, Israel and Monterey, Mexico.
He coauthored, with Daniel M. Olsen, Ranch Gates of the Southwest (Trinity Press, 2009).
He is co founder of MindState where he focusses on content development, storytelling and general communication.
FERNANDO GÓMEZ-BAQUERO
Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute
Fernando Gómez-Baquero holds a Ph.D. in Nanoscale Science and Engineering from the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering at the University at Albany SUNY. His research has focused on advanced nanomaterials for energy storage applications, on the economic impact of pervasive nanotechnologies, and on tech entrepreneurship. Dr. Gómez-Baquero has more than 15 years of experience in the nanotechnology industry, starting with production and characterization of carbon nanotubes and developing of polymer/nanotube composite materials.
He is recognized as a leader in the fabrication of nanoengineered electrodes for lithium-ion batteries using semiconductor processes and using nanotechnology to improve the performance of lithium-ion batteries. He has several publications in nanomaterials research and on the economic impact of nanotechnologies and number of patent applications in diverse applications of nanomaterials.
Dr. Gómez-Baquero is also the Director of Runway and Spinouts at the Jacobs Technion – Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech, where he is helping postdoctoral entrepreneurs build companies out of digital technologies in diverse fields such as digital health, telecommunications, education, cybersecurity, and IoT. He’s also a visiting lecturer at the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business.
OUR PARTNERS
