Led by Dan Cohen, Professor of Entrepreneurship at Wake Forest University, participants will get hands-on with IDEATE, a methodology co-created by Professor Cohen that is designed to spark fresh, entrepreneurial thinking. Over this session, participants will go step-by-step through the method so they can learn how to apply it to their own practice, while also working in small groups to test lessons learned by identifying transformative business opportunities for WashU students, alumni, faculty, and St. Louis founders. A limited number of Professor Cohen’s book, The IDEATE Method, will be available at the event.

After a successful fifteen-year career as an entrepreneur that included founding, growing, and ultimately selling his startup, Dan Cohen transitioned to academia full-time in 2005 when he accepted a faculty appointment at The University of Iowa’s Tippie College of Business. In 2007, Cohen joined the faculty at Cornell University, where he taught courses on entrepreneurship and business at the undergraduate, graduate, and executive levels and founded and directed eLab — Cornell’s entrepreneurship accelerator program hailed by Forbes Magazine as a major driver of Cornell’s ascent to a #4 national ranking in entrepreneurship. In 2015, Cohen moved on to Wake Forest University as a Full Professor of Practice in business and entrepreneurship. As the leader of Wake Forest’s entrepreneurship program and the founder and director of Startup Lab, he helps fledgling entrepreneurs refine their ideas — from product or service development to customer testing to securing investors to marketing and sales.