Large and influential institutions such as governments and corporations look to consulting firms for strategic direction to address business problems, including contributing to social change in a strategic and financially attractive way. But today’s corporate and government problems require new categories of expertise that cannot be found easily in professional consulting firms. After nearly 20 years as a strategist with global management consulting firms, Franck Escoubes was convinced that there were more creative ways to systemically support the business and public sectors. He thus launched Imagination for People (IP) in 2010 as his response to this gap in social problem-solving.He realized that one should transform the way that private and public sector consulting firms devise solutions and engage local citizens, who actually have the best understanding of the context, to collaborate with them. From supporting the citizen change-makers for their input to managing the relationship with multinational consulting firms who outsource his organization, his organization bring the citizens recommendations to influential public and private initiatives. This ensures they have high social impact but also that contributors receive financial compensation in exchange for their skills.For each opportunity, Escoubes draws on a pool of citizen experts who have been sourced and vetted through his online wiki platform, a multilingual knowledge base of creative social innovation projects, with the advanced functionality to make collaboration across the world user-friendly, intuitive and action-focused. Users can collaborate by forming online groups to tackle social problems, fostering an online and offline environment where creative ideas can germinate, incubate and be replicated through this open-source vehicle. Then by finding partners on the ground in various countries,he complements the virtual technology, creating networks of local associations, which are the in-person continuation of the online collaboration. 
Website: http://imaginationforpeople.org/en/project/imagination-for-people/ The project in 2’
Transforming citizens to consultants
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