At DORP, we’re using the festival’s infrastructure and her visitors, to develop and field test sustainable innovations, so we can speed up the transition towards a circulair economy.

What we need to achieve sustainable innovation
By 2050, The Netherlands want to be fully independent of fossil fuels and scarce primary resources. It’s a circulair economy, where there’s no more waste. How can we achieve that? By working with new materials, products and production processes. By reviewing ownership, existing business models and recalibrate our way of thinking.
There’s already a lot of great ideas and initiatives to get us going. The actual translation of these ideas to a product or service is an intense and complex process that has the tendency to halt somewhere half way. A start-up could have the proper technical background, but never really thought about the costs of their business, or an innovation remains in the R&D phase, without ever a prototype being build.
We think that the innovation proces knows a vacuum between idea and realization and we think that this is what’s obstructing sustainable development of our society.
Where DORP fits in the innovation proces
DORP is the Living Lab where concepts and experiments follow each other rapidly, with loads of interaction between multiple disciplines, varying from entrepreneurs, artists, scientists and students from every course you can think of.
With the help of experts, coaches inspirational sessions and fully stacked work places, we’re creating a spot where we visualize and experience the circulair economy. A crucial aspect, maybe even a condition, is the possibility to fail. Because when an innovation doesn’t fail in it’s proces, maybe that innovation isn’t innovative enough.
And when it fails we fix it together, establishing a great learning curve. With that, DORP is a crucial mile stone to actually launch circulair innovation


Why a festival is the perfect place fo innovation
A festival is a temporary mini society, with the same challenges as the real world. How do we gain electricity, what do we do with our resources en from where do we collect our food? The difference with the real world is that everything here is there for a short time, we can change stuff in no time and also, we can fix it quickly.
Because here, you’ll always find an emergency power supply, or a carpenter nearby. Thanks to the clear borders of the terain and by using our visitors as guinea pigs, we can measure anything and test different scenarios. This makes a festival the ideal location to field test innovations or conduct a social experiment.