Innovator & Entrepreneur
Bas Ruyssenaars is an innovator, entrepreneur and keynote speaker who helps people, teams and organizations navigate complexity, uncertainty and change.
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Bas Ruyssenaars is an innovator, entrepreneur, and keynote speaker who helps individuals, teams, and organizations navigate complexity, uncertainty, and change. His core message is that in a world that can no longer be fully controlled, the ability to experiment, learn, adapt, and keep moving forward is more important than ever.
Bas is co-founder of the Institute of Brilliant Failures, founder of The Choice Architects—a strategic agency focused on behavioural change and effective decision-making—and inventor, founder, and CEO of the innovative sport YOU.FO. He also serves as chairman of the YOU.FO RingCross World Federation.
Across his work, Bas explores one central question: how do we build a vital society with vital people, teams, and organizations? His answer lies in what he calls the art of navigation: the ability to stay purpose-driven while dealing with complexity, conflicting interests, uncertainty, and outcomes that may differ from what was originally intended.
As co-founder of the Institute of Brilliant Failures, Bas helps organizations learn from initiatives that did not go as planned. Not by glorifying failure, but by identifying recurring patterns, extracting meaningful lessons, and turning setbacks into future intelligence. His sessions are energetic, humorous, and highly relatable, while offering practical tools to strengthen learning, innovation, and collaboration.
Through The Choice Architects, Bas works on behavioural interventions, nudging, and activation strategies that help people and organizations make better decisions in practice. This ensures his keynotes are strongly connected to real-world change: not only inspiring different thinking, but enabling different action.
Bas also truly practices what he preaches. With YOU.FO, he developed a completely new sport from the ground up: a Dutch-origin game based on throwing and catching an aerodynamic ring with specially designed sticks. YOU.FO has won the Dutch National Sports Innovation Award and the European Sports Innovation Award, and is now played in more than 35 countries. International tournaments and World Cups have brought together players and teams from all over the world. For Bas, YOU.FO is not only a sports innovation but also a living example of entrepreneurship, persistence, experimentation, and ecosystem building through trial and error.
Bas speaks on innovation in complex environments, brilliant failures, entrepreneurship, behavioural change, learning organizations, healthcare innovation, start-ups and scale-ups, and the relationship between sport, movement, and business. His background in international business, cultural and organizational studies, multimedia publishing, and concept development gives him a broad and practical perspective.
His talks combine sharp analysis, personal entrepreneurial experience, humour, interaction, and practical reflection. Audiences leave with new language, renewed energy, and concrete ways to approach their own challenges differently.
Bas helps people move beyond the fear of failure and develop the courage, intelligence, and practical mindset to keep learning while moving forward.
Failure is not automatically valuable. It becomes valuable when we recognize patterns, extract lessons and share them intelligently. In this keynote, Bas introduces the philosophy and archetypes of Brilliant Failures and shows how organizations can build more learning capacity and innovation power.
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