dr. Roland van der Vorst is Head of Innovation Wholesale & Rural and CEO of Rabo Carbon Bank for Rabobank.
Roland has always worked at the crossroads of strategic thinking and creative thinking. He started his career in marketing, resulting in a position as chairman of BBDO Netherlands. After that, he started his own company on innovation and branding, with branches in Amsterdam and Delhi. After a brief stay in Singapore working as an innovation consultant and entrepreneur, he returned to the Netherlands to become the managing director of Freedomlab, a think tank and innovation company and a part time professor at TU Delft at the Faculty Industrial Design Engineering of Delft University of Technology.
Roland wrote several books on various subjects, ranging from ‘curiosity’, ‘hope’ to innovation. For example “De toekomst is eindeloos: een open blik op digitalisering”, which has a third reprint. The latest published book is “Nieuwe vervreemding: hoe technologie onze wereld betovert’. Roland is a weekly columnist of the Dutch Financial Times on technology and innovation and is considered one of the 200 most influential people in the Netherlands according to the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant.
