Fifteen years ago, the think tank business was hugely profitable. Most contracted with large organizations that provided enough funding for them to think about just one thing, often 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 for less money.”
That, she says, is why she opened her own think tank – one of over 2000 similar operations across the USA. Together, they’re thinking about 450,000 different things. The average time spent thinking about each topic: Eight hours.
Landsdowne spent 22 years thinking at Spokane’s Limitlessness. A confidentiality agreement prevents her from talking too much, though she says, “If it got out about one thing I thought about, the centuries old 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, she decided she’d had enough and quit. Within a week she’d hired three part-time thinkers and rented space above a barbershop.
“Our first client wanted us to think about spark plugs, she says – which they did for two days, receiving $275. Today Landsdowne Thinkable has 32 offices across the US, with 650 thinkers thinking about 1,945 things. The most productive branch, Duluth, is thinking about over 200 things alone – from balancing predictability points in nuclear reactors, to the best methods of poking an extra hole in a belt.
Meanwhile, the big think tanks, including Landsdowne’s former employer, are struggling to keep up with their discount competitors.
“Last I heard,” says Landsdowne, “they were thinking about ginger ale cans.”
