“The difference between good and outlier founders is simple: the ability to design what doesn’t exist yet.”

In fact, his career moved through arenas most founders never touch. He ran hotels, worked in government, sold music, co-founded a speech recognition company, and scaled an IT call center to 300 people. This non-linear journey gave him the range needed to build movements, not just companies.

In the early 2000s, Alexander joined IDEO in Palo Alto and later led IDEO Germany. There, he helped transform design thinking from a creative practice into a discipline companies could use to solve complex problems. What started as an experiment in small teams became a global method, now embedded in industries across the world.

After IDEO, Alexander set out to prove that human-centered innovation could scale. He founded bashiru and gravity-europe, design and innovation consultancies, and partnered with studios in Spain, Poland, and Ecuador to bring the approach across continents. Over the years, he led 100+ projects, creating new offerings for clients including Procter&Gamble, BMW, BBVA, ThyssenKrupp Elevators, Coca-Cola, UBS, Nestle, Audi, GoreTex, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Clariant, Columbina, Deutsche Telekom, Swarovski, Royal Bank of Scotland, Syngenta, PingAn Bank, Telefonica, BASF, Siemens, Roche, Osram, Santander, and more. 

At the same time, he co-founded ProGlove, today a market leader in industrial wearables. His work earned international design awards, patents in speech recognition and industrial technology, and recognition from the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York. Not just ideas, but companies and industries were reshaped.

Building ventures wasn’t enough. Alexander also built institutions. He co-created the HPI School of Design Thinking in Berlin and launched programs at Munich and RWTH Aachen. His lectures and programs have trained thousands of students and executives, embedding design thinking into companies and classrooms worldwide.

In 2020, Alexander co-founded EWOR with Daniel Dippold. 

As Partner and CCO, he has designed much of the fellowship’s content and platform and is the go-to coach for ideation fellows–guiding founders through their most fragile stage, when sparks of ideas become structured, scalable ventures.

Alexander sees creativity and design thinking as the defining traits of outlier founders. They allow the rare few to notice what opportunities hide in plain sight and transform overlooked signals into industry-transforming companies.