The Brussels Think Tank Building an Economy From the Ground Up

The first surprise about Club of Brussels is how little it resembles a club. There is no velvet rope in its public pitch, no promise that policy papers alone will move the world. The Brussels nonprofit calls itself a think tank, but it also runs founder training, gathers a catalog of regenerative business ideas, convenes specialists, advises territories, organizes project incubators and is preparing a complementary-currency pilot. It is an institution with a theory of change and the impatience of a workshop.

Founded in 2017 by economist and systems thinker Michel A. de Kemmeter, the organization works on what it calls the “systemic regenerative economy.” The phrase can feel densely packed. Its practical meaning is easier: stop treating unemployment, soil loss, weak local supply chains, waste and social isolation as separate files. Design businesses that work on several of them together, then connect those businesses so value continues circulating locally.

That makes Club of Brussels part think tank, part training company and part ecosystem builder. Its likely users are entrepreneurs with an early project, companies looking for transition plans, governments wrestling with linked problems, and communities that need jobs as much as they need environmental repair. Investors, mentors, academics and nonprofit partners form the outer ring. The organization’s job is less to deliver one finished product than to help those groups assemble a functioning portfolio.

The useful idea hidden in the big idea

The Club’s most stealable concept may be the “Extrapreneur.” Unlike an entrepreneur operating within one company or an intrapreneur changing one from inside, an Extrapreneur works across institutional borders. A project might need a city to open procurement, a landowner to supply a site, a company to guarantee demand, citizens to contribute knowledge and an investor to fund equipment. The founder’s advantage is not control. It is orchestration.

Extrapreneurs, the organization’s recurring action-training program, teaches that job through systems-mapping and venture-design tools. Its published course includes a “Macroscope” for seeing the wider problem, a map of alliances, exercises on risk and value, and templates for business plans and pitches. The program advertises access to mentors, investors and “SuperIncubators,” the Club’s term for partners that help projects find resources and routes to scale.

“Regenerate people first, by reconnecting them, and regenerate planet and economy afterwards.”Club of Brussels, published core value

That sentence explains the culture better than a stack of consultancy nouns. The Club places confidence, purpose, relationships and other intangible assets alongside cash, land and technology. Its public values use the language of abundance, humility and even spiritual alignment. For a procurement director, that vocabulary may require translation. For community organizers tired of programs that arrive with spreadsheets but no trust, it may sound refreshingly literal.

A catalog instead of a single cure

Kairos Multisolutions is the connective database in the middle of this model. The Club says it contains more than 350 regenerative business models. The name “multisolution” signals the selection principle: an activity should solve more than one problem and, ideally, create more than one cash flow. A regenerative farm might sell food, train workers, improve soil, process waste and host visitors. One operating asset becomes a small economic system rather than a narrow product line.

The point is not that every project must become a five-headed conglomerate. It is that local economics often contains neglected exchanges. Heat from one operation can serve another. Organic waste can become an input. Skills training can be designed around the businesses a place actually needs. Purchasing commitments can lower the risk for a new supplier. The Club’s method asks founders to draw those connections before treating venture finance as the only missing ingredient.

This is also where the business model becomes visible. Club of Brussels can earn through training, workshops, advisory assignments, events and marketplace activity while a wider partner network contributes knowledge, access and delivery capacity. As a nonprofit, it presents commercial activity as a means to the mission, not the end state. Public materials do not break down the mix, so the better way to understand it is as a service-and-network model: expertise creates programs; programs create projects; projects create demand for more expertise and connections.

These are Club of Brussels’ own published network figures, best read as indicators of ambition and reach rather than independently audited outcomes.

The currency is plumbing, not the house

The most unconventional piece is Kairos, a complementary currency meant for regenerative goods and services. The organization describes it as working alongside ordinary money, not replacing it. Early pilots were targeted for around mid-2026, with a marketplace test already available. In theory, such a system can recognize contributions that conventional budgets overlook and encourage members to buy within the network.

In practice, a currency is only as useful as the things people can buy, the confidence they place in its rules and the ease of converting effort into value. That is why the rest of the stack matters. Training without projects becomes education theater. A marketplace without suppliers is an empty shelf. Tokens without recurring trade are souvenir chips. Club of Brussels is attempting to develop each piece together, a harder task but a more coherent one.

Its “Regenerative Islands” apply the same logic to place. An island can be land, a property or even an organization where projects restore people, environment and economic activity in one bounded setting. GULLIVER, a related program, connects hosts at such sites with visitors who learn and contribute. The Club also publishes a Re-Government toolbox aimed at public authorities managing complex transitions from the bottom up.

Where it sits in a crowded market

Adjacent alternatives include the Club of Rome in global systems research, Circle Economy in circular-economy programs, Doughnut Economics Action Lab in place-based tools, the Capital Institute in regenerative finance and the Presencing Institute in systems-change learning. Club of Brussels is smaller and more operationally eclectic. It tries to occupy the connective layer between those categories.

That breadth is both its difference and its central test. A framework that can cover farms, cities, currencies, leadership and geopolitics can make surprising connections. It can also become difficult for an outsider to know what to buy first. The strongest entry points are therefore concrete: join an Extrapreneurs cohort, search the solutions marketplace, visit a regenerative site, commission a territorial workshop or bring a project to the community groups.

The Club has accumulated a notable circle of public partners. Its site lists WeForest for reforestation, the Institute for Economics & Peace for peace and resilience, Graydon Creditsafe for corporate intelligence, Agroecology Europe and the European Landowners’ Organization for land management, and House of Web3 for platform expertise. It hosted the 12th Systemic Economy Summit at Université libre de Bruxelles in 2024. More recently, its public updates described a resilience mastermind involving Belgian Defence and roughly 50 thinkers and practitioners.

The wager is not that one heroic startup fixes a place. It is that a well-connected portfolio of ordinary enterprises can make the place less fragile.

What success would look like

For Club of Brussels, the next useful milestone is not a grander vocabulary. It is a trail that links participation to durable outcomes: which ventures launched, who paid for their products, what local jobs lasted, which ecological measures improved and how much value recirculated. Its own figures - 12 SuperIncubators, 256 Regenerative Islands and more than 350 models - provide a map. Case-level reporting would turn the map into evidence.

Still, the organization has identified a real flaw in how transition work is usually arranged. Institutions slice complex places into grant categories and departmental budgets, while residents experience the problems all at once. Club of Brussels starts from that lived overlap. Its answer is untidy, human and commercial: convene the people, map the dependencies, train someone to carry the project across boundaries, and make the resulting businesses useful to one another.

A think tank can publish a future. Club of Brussels wants to prototype one. Whether its expanding system becomes repeatable will depend on the unglamorous work beneath the posters: governance, customer demand, unit economics, transparent measurement and trust. That is precisely why the experiment is worth watching. The theory has left the conference room and now has to survive the marketplace.