The Next Gen Entrepreneurship Field Guide: Design-Driven Strategies for Launching Businesses with Purpose

A new wave of entrepreneurs is leading a global paradigm shift towards values-driven business. This book empowers you to challenge the status quo and create value through its unique and adaptive approach to venture-building by design.

Authored by a multidisciplinary team of practicing design strategists, business leaders, academics, and entrepreneurs, this hands-on guide models strategic design as a mindset for starting up: framing problems, applying methods, identifying opportunities, and creating pathways forward through futures and systems thinking. Carefully curated case studies of young impact-driven entrepreneurs along with resources, including action-based frameworks, diagrams, and templates for founders to replicate, and a reader’s checklist to enable the transformation of daily practice, will open new dimensions that amplify the global shift towards a more regenerative world and a multiverse of possibilities.

Are you ready to journey to places where ideas for products, services, and experiences transform how we live and work? Then this guide is for you: the Design-Driven Entrepreneur.

Rhea Alexander spearheads this project. She’s a designer, innovation strategist, and educator, with expertise in interdisciplinary approaches to entrepreneurship and social impact. She’s a full-time faculty member at Parsons School of Design Strategies and Founder and Director of the Parsons Entrepreneurs Lab (Parsons Elab). Prior, Rhea spent 25+ years as an award-winning designer, and founder of D.I.G.S., Currently she is a board member of N.Y.C. Innovation Collective, and co-founder of MakeOurFuture.coop. (ORCID 0000-0003-1914-9086)

Rose W. Pember is a builder by design. She is co-founder of Manifesto and Hodge. She facilitates for Cornell’s Entrepreneurship Department, an Affiliate Faculty at Parsons Elab, and teaches part-time at Parsons School of Design. (ORCID 0000-0002-0948-3868)

Dr. Joseph Press is a co-founder of MakerOurFuture.coop and Futures Architect at Institute For The Future, where he recently co-authored Office Shock (2023). He co-founded the IDeaLs research group and co-authored Innovation, Design, and Leadership (IDeaLs): Transformation in the Digital Era (2021). He continues to teach as a Visiting Professor at the Politecnico di Milano, Adjunct Faculty at Parsons School of Design and is Affiliate Faculty at Parsons Elab. (ORCID 0000-0002-8193-2592)

Kiely Sweatt is a coach and innovation consultant specializing in transition management through experiential learning. She is Director of Experience and Enablement for Oracle North America Applications Sales, on the board for The Poetry Society of NY, and co-founder of The Wild. She’s Adjunct Faculty at Parsons School of Design, the College of William and Mary, and Affiliate Faculty with Parsons Elab. (ORCID 0000-0002-1728-3268)