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Listed as FastCompany’s “The World’s Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in China”, Xindanwei was the first and the most multidisciplinary coworking community and one of the most important grass-root creative centers in China. We mingle, catalyze and support creative leaders, startups and innovators locally and around the world. We create community workspaces, accelerate serendipity, facilitate knowledge sharing and collaboration, showcase and co-develop new models and projects with world-changing potential.

Xindanwei combines the best elements of a workspace (productive, functional) with a social media platform (hybrid, real-time, efficient) and a creative hub (social, energetic, creative). This gives people their own workspace in a community, while also providing opportunities to share knowledge and get inspired face-to-face and succeed through collaboration with other members.

In April 2013, I founded Ask Lab as, a social enterprise deeply rooted in a community of change agents large and small who believe that co-creation empowered by open culture and technology may be the most powerful and profitable way to improve global sustainability, economic prosperity and human well being.

Ask Lab Challenge helps large organisations create value by innovating with startups. We catalyze new business opportunities and innovation solutions for business and industry through Ask Lab co-creation and learning programs participated by startups, talents and innovation resources inside and outside of the organisations.

By bringing these two parties together, Ask Lab Challenge provides great talents access to inspiring business challenges and business gains access to a vast amount of talents. Ask Lab Challenge ignites that infectious energy and come up with new thoughts and actions, everyone can benefit from conscious cross-pollination of idea’s and insights by remaining open to entirely different disciplines and sectors.

Every Ask Lab Challenge is described and sponsored by a local/global organisation or business who knows about the issue and cares about its solution.

In Oct 2014, I joined the China Australia Millennial Project (CAMP) as the co-founder and chief curator, We brought 200 handpicked young leaders from China and Australia to go through a 100 days online incubation program to work on 20 global challenges and meet each other at the CAMP Summit.

About 90 million tons of food is wasted in Europe annually. Rice, pasta and bread are the most likely to end in the bin. No less than 38% of all rice is thrown away unused in the Netherlands. That takes it to the top of the list of wasted food.

The 5 winners of the Nudge Leadership Challenge 2013, the ‘Best Young Leaders in Sustainability’, won a trip to China with a mission to work on a solution to reduce food wastage in the Netherlands. I am their coach, learning facilitator and guide during the learning journey and mission.

Here are the first part of video blogs of this mission (in Dutch), you can find more here.

In April 2013, I curated Ask Lab's first design challenge - Audi App Jam, a program of interactive workshops intended to stimulate and deepen the design-led and crowd-shared innovation among startup’s in China to help Audi to envision the future of automotive in China. Here is how our partner Audi Tongji Joint Lab says about this project:

"Audi is exploring new ways towards innovation and customer insight. Liu Yan greatly helped us with this. Using elements from crowdsourcing, open innovation and design thinking, their unique open approach made sure we met amazingly talented people from different industries and sectors. They teamed up and were able to build their ideas on top of each other. The energy during the challenge was amazing and very inspiring to us. Many colleagues form all hierarchy levels, including board members, are impressed by the result, so we are currently preparing our next steps." (by Juergen Bauer, the head of Audi Tongji Joint Lab)

Partnered with Adapting to Climate Change in China (ACCC), I have designed and hosted a startup competition entitled “Coding for Climate Change” on Aug.31 and Sept.1, 2014

The event brings together designers, big-data researchers, and technologist to make an impact towards climate change with technology. Government sponsored researchers are involved to help the entrepreneurs to co-create amazing startups.

Here are the six projects that demoed at the final pitch of this competition: Crazy Baby,Nostalgia,GreenTransportation, Weather Nurse, Grassland Tourism, Farmer Market

A panel of judges including officials from the British and Swiss government, as well as investors focused on social-entrepreneurship granted 100,000 yuan ($16,200) seed-funding to the first two teams, respectively.

Climate change is a problem often ignored by us, but it is indeed a factor closely related to every people’s lives. While most of the events related to this theme are held by governments, “Coding for Climate Change” helps those who are passionate about the subject to distill the massive obstacle of climate change into a personal and solvable challenge.

What are transit friction points? How can we innovate around connected users?

On August 27, 2014, with the support of Transist, 15 participants from various of industry throughout the ecosystem of connected goods are invited to dive into this world: better understand the friction points in current transit patterns of the goods; explore how the lorry drivers will be loading, unloading, resting and moving around between these spaces in 2025; what disruptive examples are emerging; what this means for your business; and share learnings as experts and peers.

During this workshop, I have partnered with Patrick Leenheers, the co-founder of City Data Institute, a venture with focus on big data and solutions for city livability and urban mobility established by THNK Amsterdam Creative Leadership school, as the keynote to share their recent research findings on the emerging landscape of ‘smart urban mobility’ and the potential for new business opportunities which could be enabled via the capture and processing of complex (‘Big’) data (people + vehicles + infrastructure). This was followed up by an four-hour-action-based workshop facilitated by Patrick and myself, to propose a robust roadmap to material value, and work out the scope of special trials and local partnerships in Shanghai and other regions in China.

Co-designing and delivering an immersive 5 days learning program throughout China for these young bank execs from Africa and the UK

Working with the global top execs of Carrefour to build empathy to the future Carrefour consumers and build new visions.

An honor to work with the school that changed my life THNK to deliver innovation workshops for Kempinski hotel in Beijing and Bangkok.

Under the guidance and facilitation of Duke Corporate Education and WDHB, 33 top executives from BP, Google, L'Oréal, Schneider Electric, and Wipro engage on a learning Expedition in Chengdu, China during the first week of February 2015. The group will be exploring collaboration, customer centricity and innovation. I am invited to facilitate a design thinking workshop to help the group better understand and practice customer centricity.