Introducing Cohort 4 Design Thinking facilitators: LISA Design experts to help bringing Cohort 4 ideas to life
Design thinking facilitators are an essential part of LISA programme and culture. By sharing their guidance, they impact founders 'journey to help them achieve their goals scale their vision.
Since it was founded in the spring of 2020, Stanford LISA LEAD Incubator and Startup Accelerator has been a home to incubate more than 70+ ideas from the global Stanford GSB LEAD and MSx community and created an extensive engaging ecosystem of founders, mentors, and 70+ influential guest speakers in its through PodiumX Series.
LISA services include Design Thinking Sessions, a Stanford GSB-supported Curriculum, Storytelling and Pitching Sessions, Mentoring Sessions, Ongoing bimonthly Demo Pitch Showcases, Business and Financial Model Design, Legal & fundraising workshops, and an extensive community engagement platform, weekly cohort engagement calls, extensive engagement with mentors and facilitators from and within Stanford Ecosystem.
Through engagement, discussions, support and the facilitated feedback provided to each founding team — LISA Design thinking experts represent one of the Programme biggest success factors to launch disrupting business ventures with the potential to solve global issues.
These professionals, part of Stanford GSB LEAD and SVDT.Club networks facilitate design thinking driven venture creation for LISA third cohort of entrepreneurs, which is made of participants of Stanford GSB LEAD community, Stanford MBA, Stanford MSX, and Stanford SEED.
Wannes has been working in digital, marketing and communications for 15 years now and he is also a facilitator in the Boardle.io community and Miro expert. He has a very empathic mindset and got even better in his job by having this mindset developed further and realising how much better projects and communication goes when you put the human in the middle.
“It’s all about authentic human interaction, no matter the subject.”
Wannes joined LISA cohort 2 as a DT facilitator and since then, quoting his own words:
I’ve learned a lot of things, but what I appreciated the most was the honesty and authenticity of all facilitators to uplift each other, help each other and even carve out some time. I love participating with the LISA exec team, facilitators community and the founders and I am looking forward to another great cohort!
As a participant of the #1 LISA cohort, he enjoyed the support he received by the LISA team and LEAD community. Besides loving to work with entrepreneurs, and putting the LEAD program learnings to action, Harald’s main motivation for becoming a LISA and SVDT mentor is to return to the LEAD community.
Lara has been in design for over 10 years working with companies in Australia and the US. She currently leads the product design for Polarr, a creator community helping gen z customers discover and create their digital aesthetic. IShe has worked on products at all stages in the process from finding product market fit all the way through to scaling growth. She leans on the design thinking process to form big, ambitious moon-shoot ideas, and work iteratively to test, learn and iterate on those learnings. She has experience working on creator communities, social products and she has dabbled in the world of fintech.
I look forward to learning about the community and being a part of the journey.
Based in Silicon Valley, lived in Germany for 5 years and Indian origin, Srini uses his strong business acumen, technology understanding and cultural experience to drive growth, transformation for organizations and customers. He has partnered with software product customers in running Design Thinking services to bring value add to customer’s sales teams and relationship managers in fuelling business growth. He has been working in HiTech and Financial services industries for 25+ years partnering with customers and staying close to them.
Srini is passionate about partnering from Ideation to Innovation and Customer Experience leveraging his background and practice of Six Sigma, Lean and Agile principles. He is a staunch believer of Design Thinking Principles as it helps unleash the hidden monkeys in a process/business.
Steve is an acclaimed author, speaker, innovator, and design thinking practitioner. From x-rays and shampoo to solid state drives, Steve has transformed products, built $100M+ businesses from scratch, and brought new categories to life. From scaling the modern content marketing model to launching the world’s first SSD install app that enabled millions of people worldwide to upgrade their laptop’s hardware in minutes to launching the world’s first QLC SSD, Steve has been at the forefront of product and marketing innovation.
Steve’s design thinking methodology in the abstract world of the data center has been featured by the Stanford d.School and he has spoken at Lenovo Vision Day, HPE Discover, Open Compute, Supercompute, Flash Memory Summit, and more. Steve studied innovation and entrepreneurship at Stanford and has authored over 100 thought leadership pieces related to memory and storage. He is excited to join the Stanford LISA Lead Incubator and Startup Accelerator team as one of this year’s design thinking mentors and facilitators.
Rahul has been in Supply Chain Industry from last 16 years working with companies based in India and US. He is currently working on a Greenfield Program to build new distribution centre in US for Tapestry. Rahul use his strong analytical and technical skills with cultural experience to drive transformation and innovation.
Rahul is passionate about entrepreneurship and has been working with his spouse to scale their start-up to next level heights. Rahul joined LISA cohort 2 as a Founder and will use his experience to contribute to LISA Cohort 4 as a DT Facilitator.
Nothing has gone wrong. Trust the process.
LISA is a very great initiative and during the sessions and pitches I see a lot of passion and drive to support entrepreneurs by bringing investors and ideas to a common platform is not easy. I truly feel proud to be part of the initiative and support.
Stanford GSB and LISA both have played a major role in my life, the way I perceive situations have changed a lot…Very happy to be part of LISA Cohort and poised to support as DT facilitator for all the start-ups.
LEAD Incubator and Start-ups Accelerator (LISA)
More info on LISA — GSB-LEAD-LISA
Contributed by:
Martina Nicodemo, Deepti Pawha
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Brilliant & Diverse minds behind LEAD Incubator & Startup Accelerator Cohort 4
