Dimo Dimov is a Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Bath. His research focuses on enabling, accelerating, and funding the entrepreneurial journey, from initial idea to viable venture, in independent, corporate, and social settings. He is interested in how potential entrepreneurs and investors think, act, and interact in the face of such uncertainty and how these interactions give rise to exciting new phenomena. Dimo is a world leading scholar of entrepreneurship, founding Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Business Venturing Insights, and recognized recently among the top 100 professors of entrepreneurship worldwide. 

In this session, which took place in March 2024, Dimo argued that designing requires skills that are different from making and is an integral part of venture creation. As such, it requires distinct capabilities that enable us to connect the present with imaginary futures and thus provide continuity to the process of making the imaginary real. As designers, entrepreneurs engage in activities of framing, modeling, and performing to give a concrete action its entrepreneurial meaning of concerning a future venture. The parallel with architecture as the oldest design discipline holds important implications for how these capabilities can be developed.