Developing creative business ideas for post-pandemic Winston-Salem

Wake Forest University and NEW INC are hosting a special workshop where participants can level-up their skills while also coming together to imagine post-pandemic creative business ideas for the Winston-Salem community. 

The IdeasCityWS hands-on, virtual workshop, “Developing Ideation Skills for Life After COVID,” will be held on Thursday, April 8 from 4:30 to 6 p.m. and will be led by Dan Cohen, executive director of Wake Forest’s Center for Entrepreneurship.

Cohen developed the IDEATE method to help fledgling entrepreneurs develop higher-quality, more innovative ideas that improve the odds their startup will succeed. When subjected to randomized testing, the IDEATE method was shown to produce ideas that were significantly more innovative than the previous gold standard in teaching ideation in collegiate entrepreneurship programs.

In 2020, he was named a Master Educator by the Annals of Entrepreneurship Education & Pedagogy. Only five professors are selected worldwide for this honor.

In addition to national recognition, Cohen and the entrepreneurship center were prominently featured in the Winston-Salem Journal’s Business & Innovation section “Spotting Valuable Ideas.”

The workshop is free and open to the public. Register here. 

A number of Wake Forest startups are getting traction at Winston Starts, a local startup incubator, including Swipeby and Storage Scholars. UpDog Kombucha, co-founded by Lauren Miller and Olivia Wolff, who started the business while Wake Forest students, was recently highlighted in the Winston-Salem Journal for a newly-formed partnership with Community Brewing Ventures.  

The most recent Wake Forest Startup Lab saw five startups raise external seed capital.

Visit the Center for Entrepreneurship for more on Dan Cohen and Wake Forest News to read about the IDEATE method and “Betting on the best ideas.”

About IdeasCity and IdeasCityWS

IdeasCity, which began as a collaborative program of the New Museum, has taken many forms over the years as a platform that builds on the premise that art and culture are essential to the future vitality of cities. Winston-Salem joins a global list of cities that have hosted IdeasCity including Athens, Detroit, Istanbul, New Orleans, New York City, São Paulo, Shanghai, Singapore, and Toronto.

Throughout the 2020-21 academic year, community partners will host events to explore creative approaches to improve health and wellbeing, economic development, and justice and equity for members of the Winston-Salem community.

For more information about IdeasCityWS and to access a recording of the first Beta Bonfire on rethinking norms, visit https://ideascity.events.wfu.edu.