Before Michel de Kemmeter tried to change the way people describe an economy, he learned how a material behaves. In 1990, the Belgian entrepreneur started a company devoted to restoring marble and natural stone. The work travelled. His public CV records clients in 12 countries, and the subject followed him onto the page: in 1998 he published substantial reference books on natural stone, Belgian blue stone and wood. A future writer on invisible value began with things you could cut, polish, crack and repair.
The sequence matters because de Kemmeter's later career can otherwise look like a crowded collection of labels: author, property investor, consultant, teacher, researcher, keynote speaker, think-tank founder. Seen chronologically, one preoccupation keeps returning. He notices what holds a structure together, then asks why the usual account of that structure leaves so much out.
Stone led into buildings. From 1997, he invested in residential property, working with construction, renovation and rental projects in Belgium and Turkey. He spent time on polluted-soil and real-estate remediation with ABO Brownfields. As a project manager for Meyvaert Glass Engineering, he worked on museum showcases in Basel, Dublin, Tongeren and Hong Kong. He knew the financial value of a building, but also the stubborn physical and human details behind it: materials, craft, timing, maintenance, trust.
When the subject changed from buildings to time
By the mid-2000s, his books had moved from materials and property to less tangible resources. Fortune de Briques appeared in 2005. The Value of Time and its French edition, La Valeur du Temps, followed. The shift was not an exit from business. It was an attempt to describe the assets that make business possible but resist a clean price tag.
Time became a management question. Company culture and values became teaching subjects during his visiting lectures at Solvay Business School. Leadership became practical work through Krauthammer International. In the background sat a larger concern: if the ledger sees cash and property clearly but handles knowledge, motivation, relationships and environmental conditions poorly, leaders will repeatedly optimize the visible part and spend the rest.
“The aim is to reach a new economy in human and financially sustainable ways.”Michel de Kemmeter, public curriculum vitae
His 2011 book Les Valeurs de l'Argent brought the problem into focus. It considered money through psychology and finance, and proposed ways to measure value beyond a single monetary account. In Le Nouveau Jeu Economique, written with Paul Mauhin and published in 2014, he described a “seven balance sheets” approach. The precise labels vary across presentations, but the governing move stays consistent: widen the accounting frame so that financial, human, knowledge, social and ecological resources enter the same decision.
The wider ledger
Concept, not a scoreIllustrative bars show the categories entering one field of view. They do not represent audited values or comparative performance.
This is as much a warning about boundaries as it is an accounting proposal. A company can improve its own result by moving a cost elsewhere. A city can fund transport without connecting it to housing. An investor can record the return while the soil, skills or public infrastructure supporting that return sit off the statement. De Kemmeter's answer is to connect the accounts before declaring success.
Act II / Build between the boxesThe extrapreneur leaves the org chart
In 2007, de Kemmeter began the organizational phase of that argument. His CV dates the founding and leadership of Wise Holding, Extrapreneurs and the Club of Brussels ecosystem from that year. The Club became a school of new economic thinking and later formalized as a Brussels-based nonprofit. Extrapreneurs became its living lab.
The word “extrapreneur” is the useful clue. An entrepreneur builds a venture. An intrapreneur acts entrepreneurially inside an institution. An extrapreneur works across institutions, assembling private companies, public authorities and citizens around a shared problem. The starting assumption is practical: housing, mobility, education, employment, energy and land do not respect departmental lines. A solution contained inside one budget may simply create a bill for another.
Between 2017 and 2021, de Kemmeter ran Extrapreneurs as a training, innovation and “excubation” program in Brussels and Genval. The awkward coinage is intentional. An incubator helps something grow inside a protected setting. An excubator is meant to move innovation out of the host organization and into a cross-sector arrangement where it can operate.
His public CV says the broader team trained leaders and entrepreneurs in 20 countries and coached more than 50 regenerative multi-solution projects. Those projects were gathered in an open collection called the Systemic Multi-Solution Bank. From 2014 through 2021, he also organized nine Systemic Economy Summits, most in Belgium and one in Santiago, Chile. The repeated format suggests his preferred unit of work: convene people, map a system, build a vocabulary, test a model.
There are smaller, revealing detours in the record. Early in his career he co-founded the Trends Golf Celebrities tournament. In 2009, a short film he co-produced, La Minute de Pie, received the public prize at the Festival du Programme Court. Neither belongs neatly in an economist's biography. Both fit someone who treats events, media and learning environments as parts of the same connective practice.
Act III / The classroom becomes a laboratoryTeaching transition while practicing it
De Kemmeter's academic roles ran beside the entrepreneurial work. He lectured at institutions including UCL-LSM, ICHEC, Geneva Business School Barcelona and Solvay Entrepreneurs. From 2019 to 2022 he was an adjunct professor at VUB Vesalius College and the Brussels School of Governance, teaching new business models and leadership in times of transition.
His formal training helps explain the mix. He studied civil engineering at Ghent University from 1982 to 1984, then completed commercial-engineering studies at KU Leuven from 1984 to 1988. Engineering supplies the instinct to map dependencies. Commerce supplies the pressure test: who pays, who benefits, and can the arrangement continue?
“Together, and not alone.”Michel de Kemmeter, Le Nouveau Jeu Economique
The Club of Brussels now describes its focus as “systemic regenerative” transition. Its current public identity connects the think tank, the Extrapreneurs training lab and Kairos Multisolutions, a platform that collects tools and projects. In 2026, de Kemmeter appeared publicly as the Club's president. At Gondola Day in May, he joined the Belgian Defence Centre for Leadership for a session on resilience in times of crisis. A Club initiative that year also convened a resilience mastermind with defence leadership and international participants.
His latest book extends the arc. Published by LID in May 2026, The New World Manifesto: Let's Regenerate and Build Together is presented as a guide to coordinated change amid social, environmental and economic strain. The title carries the scale of his recent language: regeneration, sovereignty, new roles and a new philosophy of action. On LinkedIn, where his audience numbered about 14,000 in mid-2026, he published frequently on regenerative land, education, infrastructure and what he sees as flaws in the prevailing economy.
The claims are broad, sometimes deliberately provocative. The durable idea underneath them is more modest and more usable: the boundary of an institution is rarely the boundary of its consequences. Once you accept that, a manager has to look sideways. Accounting becomes a map of dependencies. Innovation becomes an alliance. Resilience becomes the capacity of a network, not a heroic property of one leader.
A builder's question for the economy
De Kemmeter's story does not move cleanly from practice into theory. It loops. A restoration business produced books. Property raised questions about money. Time management opened into psychology and company culture. Consulting fed teaching. Teaching fed a think tank. The think tank built a lab. The lab returned the ideas to projects.
That loop is the personal signature in the work. He does not appear satisfied with a concept that remains inside a paper. The vocabulary keeps turning into a summit, a course, a balance sheet, a bank of solutions or a new organizational label. Some tools will travel better than others. Their shared demand is clear: before you optimize one piece, draw the system that makes the piece possible.
The stone books still provide the cleanest metaphor. A restorer cannot repair a facade by admiring its market value. The work requires attention to composition, weather, stress, neighboring materials and the hands that intervene. Economies are less obedient than buildings, but de Kemmeter has carried the same question across four decades: what is really bearing the weight?