Before 2015, the think tank business was highly profitable. Most contracted with large organizations that providing enough funding for dozens of people to think about just one thing for five years or more.
“Those days are long gone,” says Sheila Landsdowne, founder of Landsdowne Thinkables. “Today if people are paying you to think, they want you to think about more things, a lot quicker, and for less money.”
That, she says, is why over 2000 discount think tanks have opened up across the USA, thinking about a total of 450,000 different things. The average time spent thinking about each topic: 14 hours.
Landsdowne spent 15 years thinking at Washington DC’s Unlimited/Unlimited. Confidentiality agreements prevent her from talking too much, but she will say, “If it got out about one thing I thought about, the accepted process of consuming licorice would become obsolete.”
By 2015, says Landsdowne, clients were demanding more and more. When she was given only two hours to think of what she considered an important silicone-based topic affecting millions of lives, she decided she’d had enough and quit. Within a week she’d hired three part-time thinkers and rented space above a barbershop in Moline, Illinois.
“Our first client wanted us to think about spark plugs, she says – which they did for two days, receiving $275. Today Landsdowne Unlimited is operating 32 branches with 650 thinkers thinking about 1,945 things.
The most productive branch, Duluth, is thinking about over 200 things alone – ranging from counterbalancing predictability points in nuclear reactors, to the best methods of poking an extra hole in a belt.
“The bottom line,” says Landsdowne, “is that if you want something thought about you should come to us.”
