Jonas Gissel Mikkelsen is a futurist and director at the Institute heading up business development. Jonas is responsible for creating new initiatives, formats, collaborations and joint-ventures, as well as overseeing publications and managing the Institute’s brand and identity. Jonas is dedicated to creating synergy across the Institute’s activities, realising new opportunities and initiating new progressive endeavours. His primary competencies lie within an abstract ability to create prototypal ideas and an understanding of the larger perspective of initiatives, the externalities and long-term effects.
His areas of expertise is primarily within corporate and holistic innovation, entrepreneurship, marketing and branding, and the automotive industry.
Jonas has a background and education within marketing. He started his career in the automotive industry working with marketing for Harley-Davidson on both sides of the Atlantic and later consulted startups through incubator programmes in his native Denmark and the United Kingdom. Jonas then went into advertising directing client accounts across three continents, working on some of the biggest brands on the planet such as Airbnb, Netflix and Adidas. Whilst doing so, he constantly questioned the raison d’être of the creative industry which led him to heading up corporate innovation, lastly for the US-based agency Chiat\Day.
His efforts evolved from traditional corporate innovation, which encompasses subjects like process and product development, to a much more existential innovation, referred to as holistic innovation, questioning an organisation’s very role in society, its success parameters and essentially testing all "what if?" and "why not?" questions. In that work he created and launched experimental initiatives, joint-ventures, skunkwork labs and subsidiaries. Jonas left advertising to work freelance with holistic innovation across industries, public and private organisations around the globe before joining the Institute.
Professionally, Jonas is interested in and motivated by progressive, futuristic subjects, opportunities and challenges, but in his spare time he finds peace in looking to the past. Born and raised amongst farms and fields, there is a country boy beneath the futurist and that country boy loves things of the past, especially vintage mechanics, music and architecture. You will often see him around Copenhagen on vintage motorcycles.
There is as much contrast in Jonas’ interest as there is in his past and experience, and he loves to geek out and gain new knowledge. This is best illustrated in his extracurricular activities, such as his life membership of the world’s oldest debating society, The Cambridge Union, or his former vice presidency of the Cambridge University Technology & Enterprise Club. Also partaking in various programmes, like winning an innovation challenges by Nokia research or people’s choice award in a Founders of Tomorrow challenge with a concept called "Transnaturism", to name a few.
