A better world through ideas

At The Idealists, we make the world a better place by turning impactful ideas into reality. We assess, validate, pair and grow your Sustainable Development Goal related idea into a company for you, free of charge.

Why

We believe the world can and should be a place where everybody has plenty and is fulfilled and that the solutions to get there are already distributed over the brains of all 7.8 billion people on this planet.

Unfortunately only 3% of all people ever turn their idea into reality.

With The Idealists, we want to unlock and realize the 97% of solutions that would otherwise go to waste.

We can’t achieve the SDG’s by running on only 3% of our global brain, we need to unlock the full 100%. We need your idea to become reality too.

How

We’ve built a unique idea-platform called imaengine which is based on a mix of collective- and artificial intelligence. Because of this, we can rapidly but accurately assess whether an idea is a good idea.

Within imaengine we can then match those good ideas with talented co-founder teams, mentors and investors and together turn them into successful companies.

With imaengine, we can focus on the 97% of ideas that people aren’t going to realize themselves and turn these into a reality for them as a shareholder and the world to profit from. And all of this without them having to invest time or money.

With imaengine, we have created a system where everyone can contribute to creating a better world. Either by submitting their impactful idea as an idea-person, growing such an idea as co-founder, guiding an idea as mentor or by investing in these ideas and profiting from them as an impactful investor.

Why we focus on the SDG’s

We’ve chosen to only accept ideas that match the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, because we believe helping achieve them is currently the best way to brings humankind closer to our vision of an age of plenty

Who are WE

We are a group of very experienced entrepreneurs. We founded dozens of companies, multiple with over 1000 employees and held senior management positions at Dutch Multinationals.

Special thanks to our friends for their advice and guidance

Herman Wijffels, Former chairman of the Executive Board of Rabobank and Dutch administrator at the World Bank - Marc Nager, Founder Startup Weekend and Ex-CCO Techstars - Elizabeth Yin, Ex-Partner 500 startups - Ad van Berlo, Founder VanBerlo - Piet van der Wielen, Brainport - Egbert-Jan Sol, CTO TNO - David Wyler, Founder The Kairos Society - Marielle Sleumer, Brainport - Gijs van de Molengraft, BOM - Hans Helsloot, Senior IP Advisor RVO - Jan-Eric Kwak, Creative Director Amped - Mark Frederiks, Managing Director Amped - Scott Saslow, Founder One World - Anne Welsh McNulty, Founder John P. and Anne Welsh McNulty Foundation - Johan de Jong, Ex-Stichting Idee - Ton van Tielraden, Ex-Senior Vice President & General Counsel Ahold - Rob van den Heuvel, Founder Sendcloud - Michael Hienkens, Head of Lending & Daily Banking, ABN AMRO - Francis Heyligen Director, Global Brain Institute at VUB

Our Story

As a child our Founder Mareno de Kort was constantly jotting down ideas on how the things around him could be improved.
As organizing all these papers became a bit of a chore, he bought an empty book and started filling this ‘book of ideas’.

When this book got full, age 11, he realized that just jotting these ideas down didn’t really help anyone.
This is when he thought up an ‘idea-factory’, a place of wonder where he with the help of the world’s most brilliant minds would turn all these ideas into reality, for the world to profit from.
This however would not run cheap, so how was he going to make the money required to build this ‘idea-factory’?

In the following years he set up over 500 hair salons globally and a multitude of startups trying to amass enough funds for his idea-factory. Whilst travelling the world for all these companies, he started noticing a pattern.
Almost everyone he spoke to had one or more brilliant ideas that they were extremely passionate about, but nevertheless weren’t realizing.
He found statistics that showed, that only 3% of all people ever realize their idea. This felt like the biggest possible waste to him. These ideas could improve lives today, yet were stuck in people’s minds.
This is when he thought ‘if my idea-factory could work for my ideas, why not open it up for everyone’s ideas?’.
That is when the idea of The Idealists was born.

Soon he was travelling all over the world again, but this time to learn from the best in the fields of idea-selection, crowdsourcing and startups to be able to build The Idealists.
This is when our team started forming. Nearly everyone Mareno met, whether it was in Silicon Valley or even New Zealand, was excited about the prospect of building a system to finally unlock the potential of the other 97% and wanted to help.
If everything, man-made, around us has been thought up by only 3% of all people and thus 3% of our global intelligence, then what could the world be like if we finally used the full 100%?

Since then, with our amazing team and help from all over the world, we have built our idea-platform imaengine.
Imaengine is built on a unique combination of collective intelligence and artificial intelligence, which allows us to very accurately and rapidly assess whether an idea is actually a good idea and to then pair it with the right co-founders, funders, mentors, coaches and employees. Truly IT for good and for our founder his lifelong dream finally come true.