Bob Thompson MCIPS

Co-Founder & CEO

Bob Thompson’s journey from British Army serviceman to procurement and transformation specialist, and ultimately founder of Ideas-Shared, spans almost five decades of working with people, organisations, technology and change.

Bob served for more than 13 years in the British Army before beginning a civilian career in 1991. Over the following decades, his work took him through procurement, consulting, technology and large-scale organisational transformation, including leading procurement transformation across 11 European countries and £1.4 billion of spend at Fujitsu, and helping develop a £172 million outsourced consumables managed service supporting University Hospitals of Leicester’s Scan for Safety programme.

Throughout his career, Bob became increasingly interested in a recurring challenge: why, when people possess extraordinary amounts of knowledge, experience, ideas, relationships and capability, is it still so difficult for them to find one another around what matters and make meaningful progress together?

Rather than beginning with a technology or predetermined solution, Bob set out to understand the barriers.

The result was a simple seven-step process designed to help people move from identifying an ambition to making it visible, attracting participation, combining capabilities, organising activity and pursuing measurable outcomes. Over ten years, that process evolved into Ideas-Shared and its Ambition Operating System.

Underlying it is Bob’s philosophy of Intelligent Collaboration: people do not need to agree about everything to work constructively around the things they want to change, improve, stop, protect, create or achieve.

His belief is equally straightforward: participation should not be reserved for leaders, experts, institutions or established changemakers. Everyone should be able to decide what matters to them and have a practical way to do something about it.

Today, Bob’s ambition is to help establish an Ambition Economy in which individuals, informal groups and organisations can use simple, everyday activities to find one another, combine their capabilities and turn personal, professional and societal ambition into meaningful progress.

“Every person has sovereign power to decide what matters. When we combine that power intelligently with others, personal, professional, and societal ambition becomes collective capability.”

Ivar Ingimarsson

Co-Founder & Catalyst

Ívar Ingimarsson is a former Iceland international footballer, entrepreneur and businessman whose career took him from a small community in east Iceland to English professional football and the Premier League.

Ívar is best known in England for his eight years with Reading Football Club, where he played an important part in the club’s record-breaking 2005–06 Championship-winning season and subsequent promotion to the Premier League. He was voted Reading’s Player of the Season in 2006–07 and later became club captain, alongside representing Iceland at international level.

Following his football career, Ívar returned to Iceland and became involved in business, tourism and regional development.

His place in the Ideas-Shared story began with something much simpler: Ívar had an idea he wanted to pursue, but he did not know how to make it happen. So he asked Bob Thompson for help.

That serendipitous conversation became the catalyst for what followed.

In trying to work out how Ívar might progress his idea, Bob encountered a much bigger question: why should it be so difficult for someone with an ambition to find the right people, knowledge, capabilities and support needed to move it forward?

The more Bob explored that question, the bigger the challenge became. Ívar’s individual problem was not unique. People everywhere have ideas, concerns, problems, opportunities and ambitions, yet often struggle to find one another, organise effectively and turn intention into outcomes.

What began as an attempt to help one person progress one idea therefore evolved into years of investigation, experimentation, engineering and development. Bob identified the barriers, developed a simple seven-step process to help overcome them, and progressively built the philosophy, methodology, tools and participation infrastructure that became Ideas-Shared.

Ívar could not have known where that first conversation would lead. Neither could Bob.

And perhaps that is what makes the story so appropriate.

One person had an ambition. He needed capabilities he did not possess himself. He reached out to someone else. And something neither of them could have predicted emerged from the connection.

For Ideas-Shared, Ívar was the catalyst.