A chance meeting at a conference provided the spark that ignited Capp. It all happened when Nicky asked Alex “What would an organisation look like if it was built to realise people’s strengths?” From these beginnings, Capp was born. As a leading positive psychology academic, Alex Linley could see the potential for positive psychology and strengths approaches to make a difference in people’s lives. Equally, he could see that this difference would not be made by the research sitting in weighty academic tomes on dusty library shelves. “Somebody needs to take positive psychology out into the world” was his mantra. Being big on personal responsibility, he had asked himself why that shouldn’t be him. With the nudge from Nicky, the idea took shape and the two of them got together to make it happen. The rest, as they say, is history...

We were first registered as an organisation in 2005, and opened our first office at The Venture Centre, on the University of Warwick Science Park, in September 2006. Our location is reflective of our intellectual capital as an organisation, and Alex’s alumni links to the University of Warwick (he was awarded his PhD Psychology from Warwick in 2004). We’re now in our third office at The Venture Centre, having doubled in size approximately every two years.

We were supported in the early years by our four Founding Sponsors, Allied Irish Bank, Aviva (formerly Norwich Union), BAE Systems, and Unilever.  For Allied Irish Bank, Aviva and BAE Systems, their support was focused on taking the best of positive psychology and strengths approaches and applying them to their people and organisation development. For Unilever, their interest was in being at the forefront of positive psychology developments, and understanding how they could be used to support the Unilever mission “to add vitality to life”.  From these early days, we have maintained our relationships with our Founding Sponsors, at the same time as growing our client base significantly year-on-year.

We organised the first Applied Positive Psychology Conference at the University of Warwick in April 2007, and the second Applied Positive Psychology Conference at the University of Warwick in April 2009. To each event, we attracted around 250 people from over 20 countries around the world, all of whom were interested in how they could use positive psychology and its applications.

Our mission of Strengthening the World is delivered specifically through our consulting work, but also through our focus on disseminating our knowledge and applications, including, for example, our editing of the Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology and Work, published by Oxford University Press in 2010. Capp Press was founded in 2007, and has so far published three books in the Strengthening the World series, while Realise2, our leading-edge online strengths assessment and development tool, was launched in June 2009. It has so far been completed by more than 25,000 users, who have been enabled to discover their strengths and learn more about what they can do to realise them.

Capp has established an international reputation through our work in strengths and positive psychology. This reputation, and our experience and expertise, provides the foundation from which we continue to build in realising our vision of being a recognised, world-leading Centre of Excellence, enabling organisations and people to achieve their goals.