My name is Erik Roscam Abbing. I offer services as designer, innovator, consultant, coach, teacher and investor in the domain of water resilient urbanism.

My experience and expertise are rooted in Industrial Design Engineering (Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands ’95) and Design Management (Nyenrode, the Netherlands, 2006). After having worked as a practicing product designer and starting my own product design firm, I discovered and developed my strategic consulting skills. (I still believe strategy greatly benefits from hands on experience and feet on the ground technical insight). In 2006 I started my own design led brand & innovation consultancy, picked up a teaching position at Delft’s strategic design master, and became a public speaker on the world’s conference stages. I wrote a book on one of my main hobbies, Brand Driven Innovation, and made a documentary with 6 master students on how design impacts business. It was a fun time working for A-brand clients across the globe.

By 2016 I had discovered that running my 10 person consultancy entailed spending more time on HR, contracts and invoices than on helping clients. I decided to merge my business with Livework, so I could build their Western European presence, find the support I needed, and get back into the game of top level consulting. As group director of innovation at Livework I was responsible for developing the Livework service innovation offer as well as making sure their knowledge, methodologies and tools remained at the cutting edge of service design. Meanwhile I was building large international accounts and developed a strong focus on service innovation for sustainable urban development. Also, purely out of passion, I started offering pro bono services to NGO’s in ocean conservation.

in 2022, the post covid boom made me realize how much I had loved 2021, where the Covid induced sluggish pipeline forced me to be my best creative, entrepreneurial, innovative self. By that time Livework Netherlands was 30 people strong, with a robust client portfolio and service design offer. I felt it was time for me to move on, and rediscover my own roots, principles and focus.

All throughout my career I’ve been fascinated by the power of design (thinking) to innovate meaningfully with people and for people. And all throughout my career I’ve been less interested in how to do things and much more in why to do them and what to achieve with them. In other words: I love purpose driven work. I love getting deep into the content. I love making impact and getting initiatives on the market. I achieve these results through a lot of different tools and methodologies I’ve learned to master over the course of my career. In practice this means I freely apply methodologies and ways of working form service design, urbanism, customer experience, product design, ecosystem innovation, systems change and agile. I approach challenges holistically.

Also, I have discovered over the years that me and my clients thrive if I allow myself to work on content that I really deeply believe in. This has led to a focus on experience design and service innovation challenges around urbanism, especially where cities and the people in them live and work with water. Read more about what that means under ‘vision‘ and ‘services‘

And feel free to contact me at hello@erikroscamabbing.com or +31624518462

Erik.