# Inventive Designers

Inventive Designers is an Antwerp, Belgium based software development company, which belongs to the Unifiedpost group. The company was founded in 1994 by Guy Dehond and Patrick Morren. Guy Dehond was one of the beta testers of the IBM AS/400 (codenamed "Silverlake") at IBM. Dehond and Morren had worked with this system for years, and their first products were for the AS/400 and its OS/400 operating system. Later they started to design products for cross-platform environments. Today, the company specializes in software for customer communications management in the public, financial, telecommunications, utility, insurance and healthcare industry, in over 30 countries.
In 2010, the company received a CIOnet Innovation Award.
The company participates in the AFP Consortium and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). At the W3C, Inventive Designers was active in the XSL Working Group, and Chief Technical Officer Klaas Bals was the editor of XSL Requirements 2.0 document. Currently, the company plays an active role in W3C's Forms Working Group.
At the end of 2012 Guy Dehond handed over the company to his daughter Joke Dehond and his son-in-law Klaas Bals.
In May 2017, Jim Verbist was named CEO of the company. In December 2018, the company was acquired by Unifiedpost.

## Company timeline

| 1994 | Inventive Designers BVBA founded by Guy Dehond and Patrick Morren in Belgium |
| 1996 | Alteration of Inventive Designers BVBA into Inventive Designers NV (comparable to limited liability company) |
| 1998 | Introduction of EverGreen/400 to allow 5250 non-programmable workstations to act as a full e-mail capable terminal |
| 1998 | Worldwide distribution of EverGreen/400 by IBM |
| 1999 | Introduction of DTM for AS/400, capable of converting OfficeVision documents to XML |
| 1999 | Inventive Designers' Litrik De Roy is co-author of the IBM Redbook: How to Replace OfficeVision/400 in Your Applications |
| 2000 | Move to new offices |
| 2002 | Worldwide distribution of DTM for iSeries by Lotus Software |
| 2002 | Introduction of Scriptura XBOS, one of the first what-you-see-is-what-you-get XSL editors |
| 2004 | Release of Scriptura Designer and Scriptura Engine, first steps towards a document composition tool |
| 2004 | IBM's Watson Research Group invites Inventive Designers to join the XSL Working Group of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) |
| 2005 | Release of Scriptura XSL Business Output Suite, a platform to compose templates and generate multi-channel output. Introducing electronic forms. |
| 2006 | The company joins the AFP Consortium |
| 2006 | Director Joke Dehond receives XPlor's Electronic Document Professional certification |
| 2007 | Release of the Scriptura Post-Processor, enabling grouping, bundling, sorting ... |
| 2009 | Release of IntelliStamp (patent pending), a hybrid signature to secure electronic and paper documents |
| 2009 | Inventive Designers is selected for the Benelux short list of Logica's 'Global Innovation Venture Program' contest |
| 2009 | Release of Scriptura Document Flow, a what-you-see-if-what-you-get interface to design and execute document flows. Replaces the Scriptura Post-Processor |
| 2009 | Partnership with Xerox for Belgium and Luxemburg |
| 2010 | Scriptura's newest version gets a new name: Scriptura Engage |
| 2011 | IntelliStamp project at IAK wins DCM award |
| 2012 | Mechelen and Antwerp first cities worldwide to use IntelliStamp |
| 2012 | IntelliStamp Antwerp laureate ‘Accenture Innovation Award 2012’ |
| 2012 | In December Joke Dehond and Klaas Bals took over the company as co-CEOs |
| 2013 | The IntelliStamp Center now offers IntelliStamp as a cloud service |
| 2014 | In April Scriptura Engage is named in Printing and Imaging by Gartner |
| 2014 | Scriptura Engage launches its own product website |
| 2015 | DataNews named Joke Dehond as ICT Woman of the Year 2015 |
| 2015 | Inventive Designers sells IntelliStamp to Cipal, to focus on the internationalization of Scriptura Engage |
| 2017 | Jim Verbist takes over as CEO |
| 2018 | Acquisition of Inventive Designers by UnifiedPost |