Dan Lauer, who led the University of Missouri-St. Louis’ entrepreneurship program for seven years, has been hired for a new role at Lindenwood University.
Lindenwood, with its main campus in St. Charles, said Tuesday it has named Lauer as chief entrepreneurship officer in its Plaster College of Business and Entrepreneurship. Lauer joins Lindenwood after having most recently been founding executive director of UMSL Accelerate, the entrepreneurship arm of UMSL.
Lindenwood said in a news release that Lauer, the creator of Waterbabies dolls, will help bolster its entrepreneurship offerings and that it plans to incorporate the type of university-led startup accelerators that Lauer launched at UMSL into its own programming.
“Dan Lauer’s experience elevates Lindenwood University’s efforts to be a leader in the entrepreneurial space,” said Lindenwood President John Porter. “We’re focused on entrepreneurship with a big ‘E,’ and we are eager to be intentionally disruptive in the ecosystem. With a desire to establish corporate accelerators and purpose-driven accelerators, Lindenwood will attract outstanding students and impactful partners.”
Lauer in 2016 became founding executive director of UMSL Accelerate. He said highlights of his tenure at UMSL, of which he is an alumnus, were launching university-led accelerators and expanding curriculum, including the addition of a business degree with an emphasis on entrepreneurship, and providing hands-on entrepreneurship experiences for students.
“We moved the needle,” Lauer said in an interview.
UMSL Accelerator in 2017 launched a corporate accelerator program with Ameren Corp. (NYSE:AAE) focused on supporting energy startups. The Ameren Accelerator provided $100,000 each to 19 startups through three cohorts from 2017 to 2019. UMSL Accelerate in 2020 launched its Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Accelerator, which has provided $50,000 grants to 17 startups led by underrepresented founders.
“We are grateful for all Dan has done to help build entrepreneurship into the culture of the College of Business Administration and our university as a whole,” Steven Berberich, UMSL’s provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs, said in a news article published on UMSL’s website. “We are committed to building on his legacy and the foundations that he built to help our students discover the entrepreneurial spirit and to support business innovation, which is critical to growing the workforce and strengthening the economy of the St. Louis region.”
An UMSL spokesperson said the university plans to launch the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Center at UMSL and will hire a director to lead its operations. The university will also continue to operate UMSL Accelerate and its DEI Accelerator, with a fourth cohort of the program planned for later this year.
At Lindenwood, Lauer said he wants to scale the university-led accelerator model he developed at UMSL, focusing on corporate and purpose-driven accelerator programs across a range of topics. He said he will place focus on engaging students in novel ways that generates their interest in entrepreneurship.
“Universities have to change how they behave, in my small opinion, in terms of the deliverables for students. With online (learning), competition, the aftereffects of Covid, you’ve really got to create experiential learning that is compelling to get people on campus,” Lauer said.
Lauer joins Lindenwood as it seeks to expand, announcing in March it acquired Michigan-based Dorsey College through a new nonprofit entity it formed called Lindenwood Education System. The deal adds more than 1,800 students, on top of Lindenwood’s enrollment of 7,000-plus.
