Impact Hub Amsterdam is profiling extraordinary encounters between entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs, the use of innovative methods to solve common social issues, and time-proven business solutions for topical problems. It’s not easy to grow collaboration between large organisations and individual entrepreneurs – how can we experiment and learn together? We are curious about members who dare to look beyond the horizon and seek to cooperate in sharing resources, knowledge and insights towards positive impact. This series shows the cooperation between these unlikely allies.
This time we turn to Olivier Coops, a social entrepreneur, member of the Board for Max Foundation, and cofounder of Dinst a platform with the goal to provide a longer and more comfortable life at home through the hiring of care services. An interesting meeting between soft care and hard entrepreneurship. Feel inspired to share your Impact Hub unlikely allies stories in support of impact driven partnerships!
UNLIKELY Innovation
What is your most inspiring impact story that has your concern right now?
If there is one place where innovation is happening, it is in the traditional world of home care and home service where care is offered under free market business models very alike to Marktplats and eBay. As a challenger within the pharmacy game in my previous work as CEO for YourMedical, I got quite acquainted to work against the settled order. This is a useful mindset and experience that helps us (myself and 4 co-workers) to continue game-changing from our home base at the Impact Hub Amsterdam. If we succeed to bring together the right group of people, an online platform will guarantee higher level of quality in offered services at home provided by the self-employed. Internet is the unexpected, expected partner to accelerate gain in being faster, more innovative and smarter for hiring expert care and services at home.
Increase of an aging population and a cut in governmental expenses, are just two causes that forcefully stimulate people to get more involved in this industry formerly held by strong invincible regulatory ties. A compelling result is the mass closure of homecare facilities, which indirectly is telling society to kindly live longer at their own or families’ homes. So, solutions are on us to find. Dinst is one of the social enterprises that cares for quality and sees the indisputable need of a better care infrastructure in the coming era of civic participation.
UNLIKELY Cooperation
What’s your most favourite social issue yet unexplored and which member are you enthusiastic about to cooperate with on this?
Dinst leans on the here-to-stay sharing services like Peerby and Konnektid, where key aspects are personal relations and quality of privately-owned offers. Through our platform, we focus on how to enable the self-employed entrepreneurs offering qualitative care and service more personal, reliable and trustworthy. On a daily basis we encounter the appearing loss of trusted quality, yet overall this is still a glaring social issue. Our challenge is to hand over the authority formerly carried by semi-government owned service provider institutions to our self-employeds. With the scope on the whole emerging issue of a life longer lived at home under one’s own responsibility, care appeared to be just a minor part of our social business.
Our former model was mainly focused on the weaker care demanding group, under the name WeZorgen. We discovered the need of a name change to Dinst and repositioned ourselves on the market. From solely home care to a broader range of services at home, still occurring around the same emerging question ‘How to live longer at home and to provide for your own care?’. In cooperation with a small group of diverse people within the Impact Hub, we built WeZorgen and now embark further with Dinst to make our social impact happen.
UNLIKELY Talent
Who, in your view, drives positive social change and deserves to be in the spotlight?
A foundation that looks after the issues of social entrepreneurs, gives insight on social entrepreneurship to the broader public and the government institutions. Social Enterprise NL deserves to be in the spotlight. Within the Impact Hub community I appreciate Michel Visser’s Konnektid for the way he shows us how new knowledge is available at your doorstep. Keep an eye on him, if you want to learn new hobbies or to improve yourself overall.
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