Vorsprung® | Strategic Design Practice

Vorsprung is where Jo Van Grinderbeek designs the things that don't exist yet, from the need that justifies them to the reason anyone will want them. It brings together twenty years across creativity, business and technology.

Designing

tomorrow

Brand experience was my thing. For years I worked on how you bring someone into a world, and mostly on what people actually want, because nothing moves without that. As Design Director at Wunderman Thompson, now VML, I did it for Samsonite, Liberty Global, Pioneer DJ and Telenet, work recognised at Epica with a Grand Prix, and at Clio, Eurobest and Cannes Lions. I spent fifteen years making people want things.

What bothered me was the brief. Marketing was often treated as the fix, and it usually wasn't. The thing that had gone wrong sat further back, in the product, or the price, or the business behind it, and no campaign was going to repair that. I became far more interested in going back there and writing a better answer.

That took me out of advertising and into technology, at De Cronos Groep, an ecosystem of five hundred companies and nine thousand people. There, I started Restless Minds™ because I kept seeing the same problem in how companies change. The strategy gets decided, the plan gets made, and then somebody has to convince everyone to want it. It felt like marketing all over again. So we turned it around and designed the change people wanted instead. One of the first places we put that to work was the Belgian Ministry of Justice, stalled for ten years. It moved. And it's still moving today.

And the work kept getting bigger. First the product or service. Then the business behind it. Then the brand and the reason anyone would choose it. Eventually, I wasn't designing parts of companies anymore. I was designing the company. Today I co-lead Norden, also inside De Cronos Groep, sitting with the boards of its largest clients on where they want to go in the AI era. Creative, business, technology. Somewhere along the way, they stopped being three different jobs. A company isn't a product, a strategy and a technology. It's one thing. So I started designing it that way.

I design the reason a thing should exist. The problem worth solving. What should exist to solve it. And whether it should exist at all. Most ideas don't survive that last question. The ones that do get designed whole, because form is not decoration. Form is decision.

Some of the ventures I designed had no brief at all. They started with something I thought should exist. When venture studios began calling about them, that work needed a name. I called it Vorsprung, the German word for advantage. Not because getting there first is enough, but because the real advantage is knowing what should exist when you get there.

Vorsprung is not my name. It is my ambition.

WHAT I DESIGN. HOW YOU JOIN.

Venture design
for studios

Every studio can build. The difference is what you choose to build. I work before the first gate, on the opportunity worth taking through it: what it should be, why people will want it and what has to be true for it to work. I stay and build it with you.

Venture design
for brands

Studios have too many ideas to choose from. Most companies have none, only the feeling that more is possible. Either way, I design the opportunity into a company that can stand on its own, ready to launch, fund or spin out. Your name opens the market. The venture earns its own.

Ventures of
my own

Some ventures you find. Others have to be written. When I see one worth making, I start. The product, the experience, the brand and the business, designed as one. Then I look for the other half. The capital, the builders, the founders who see it too.

Venture
Design

Before we build, the venture has to hold together. The research, the need, the product, the brand and the business, designed as one coherent whole. Real enough to test, fund and start building.

But that's not where the design ends. I start the company with you and stay on as creative founder, because a venture changes when it meets technology, capital, customers and the people building it. My job is to keep designing what it becomes.

What is,
and isn't

Who is Jo Van Grinderbeek?

Jo Van Grinderbeek is the founder of Vorsprung. He spent twenty years across the worlds that shape companies: as Design Director, Brand Experience at Wunderman Thompson/VML; in consultancy, including the transformation of the Belgian Ministry of Justice; and inside De Cronos Groep, one of Belgium's largest technology ecosystems, where he co-founded Norden. Vorsprung is where those worlds come together.

Is this a design agency?

No. A design agency is usually brought in to design the form of something already decided. Vorsprung starts earlier, when the answer is still open: what should exist, why people will want it, and what has to be true for it to work.

Is this a business consultancy?

No. Vorsprung doesn't separate the thinking from the thing itself. The strategy becomes the product, the experience, the brand and the business. You don't just leave knowing what to do. You can see what it could become.

Is this a venture studio?

Not quite. Venture studios build companies. Vorsprung is focused on designing the venture itself: what should exist, why people will want it, how it works and how the business holds together. That can happen with a studio, inside an existing company, or independently.

So what is it?

A venture design practice. Vorsprung starts with the need, never with the answer. People don't need products. They need what products make possible. From there, I design the product, the service, the experience, the brand and the business as one venture.

Do you do branding?

Yes, but never as a separate layer. Vorsprung is not a brand agency. There is no logo project or identity added at the end. The brand is designed with the product, experience and business from the beginning, because what a company does and how it feels should tell the same story.

Do you build the final product?

Vorsprung designs far enough to make the venture real: to see it, test it, understand the business behind it and decide whether it deserves to be built. What happens next depends on the venture. The right founders, specialists, technology partners and capital come together around what it needs to become.

Is this only for venture studios and investors?

No. Vorsprung works wherever there is an opportunity worth turning into a venture: with studios, investors and companies looking for what to build next, or independently when I see the opportunity first.

Do you work on existing businesses or only new ideas?

Both. Sometimes the opportunity is an entirely new company. Sometimes it means seeing an existing market, product or business in a completely different way. The starting point is the same: what do people need, what is becoming possible, and what should exist because of it?

How long does an engagement take?

It depends on the question. An initial direction can take shape in weeks. Designing the venture across product, experience, brand and business typically takes two to four months. Some opportunities need more work before they deserve to become companies.

What does Vorsprung actually deliver?

A venture you can build a company around. The opportunity, the product or service, the experience, the brand, the business model, the business case, the prototype and the investor story, whatever it takes to make the whole thing hold together. Not a collection of deliverables, but one venture, designed as one. And when it gets built, I stay on to shape it alongside the founders who take it forward.

Is this AI-generated work?

AI is part of how I work, not the source of the work. The ideas, choices and creative direction are mine. AI makes it possible to move much faster from thought to something you can see, test and react to. Specialists take the work further where specialist craft is needed. Think of it as a faster pencil, not a different mind.

Make the things people want.

info@vorsprung.be

vorsprung

info@vorsprung.be