What is a Design Entrepreneur?

Virginia Berman, Food+FutureCoLab Fellow

Business, like fashion, and education, evolves. Business learns from the past. The old ways get pushed aside or built upon and new ways bring us forward. Established businesses are slow to change. Newer, nimble ones test new tactics . The Food+Future CoLab is brand new and it moves nimbly. For me, working here has been a radical shift from where I was and an immersion in prototyping quickly. A few weeks ago I left an social business with the triple bottom line, where I’d been working for 20 years. We were having asocial and environmental impact, if slowly. We were not nimble. Decisions happened in complicated ways.

The mindset embraced and lived at the Food + Future coLab is liberating. It’s freedom to act and decisively. It’s not the old style. Just what is the new Mindset of a Design Entrepreneur, the MODE?

To find out what it is, I learned, we need to look for the PROOF…

Proactive. Don’t get ready. Get Started. Jump in where you are. Fail quickly.

Resourceful. Hack what you can to learn quickly, with the resources you have.

Open. Strong ideas, weakly held. Bring and have strong opinions and be ready to listen to other persuasive and valid opposing ideas.

Optimistic. What if it works?! Believe and first, imagine it will.

Focused. Edit. Execute. Repeat. Again.

By Jan 22nd, the Food+FutureCoLab will come to an end along with my crash course in being in the MODE. Whatever we do, I will have PROOF that the MODE spurred my creativity, fostered prototyping big ideas and imagine new ways to address real social problems. To learn more on what we create, stay tuned!

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