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Alex Cowan

Academic General Faculty

Office

FOB 112

Areas of Expertise

Product Design, Agile Methodologies, Lean Methodologies, Entrepreneurship, Intrapreneurship & Innovation

Education: Studied Industrial Engineering and Economics at Stanford University 
  
Alex Cowan teaches four courses in the area of design and digital innovation: Digital Product Management, Software Design, Software Development, and the Digital Capstone. He also teaches in the Masters of Science in Business Analytics.

With Darden, he also created the Coursera specialization 'Digital Product Management', one of the top 15 specializations on Coursera. His work on hypothesis-driven development is widely used by practitioners and instructors as a systematic approach to developing new products and businesses.

Alex divides his time between instructing, advising and consulting. He's delivered workshops to student and professional audiences at venues like General Assembly, The Lean Startup Circle, Startup Weekend, SVPMA, Swissnex, CMU, UCSC, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, the UVA iLab and Stanford's d.school. Alex currently serves on four corporate boards and as an adviser to multiple startups and 'intrapreneurial' ventures.  

Prior to his time at Darden, Alex has been an entrepreneur (5x) and an intrapreneur (1x). Most recently, he advised and invested in Singularity Networks (acquired by Cisco in 2019).