Raphaël H Cohen
Serial entrepreneur, business angel, professor, and best-selling author, Raphaël H Cohen is one of the world's leading experts in entrepreneurship, fostered engagement, psychological safety and corporate governance.
Keynote Speaker · Framework Architect · Executive Educator
Creator of the IpOp Model & the Fair and Caring Leadership frameworks Primary inspiration for ISO 56007 · Serial Entrepreneur
Raphaël H Cohen has done something rare in management: he has built governance frameworks rigorous enough to become international standards and practical enough to pay for themselves — delivering them with rigor and humor as a keynote speaker, executive educator, and mentor inside organizations as different as Nestlé, Swiss cantonal banks, university hospitals, and SMEs.
Recognized as one of the world’s leading experts in intrapreneurship, innovation governance, fostered engagement, and psychological safety, his work rests on one observation: the organizational problems that resist the most — project cost overruns, time delays, slow or stalled innovation, disengaged teams, employees who hold back — cannot be solved by better managers or better intentions alone. They also require practical frameworks most organizations have never considered. Rigorously addressing that observation over thirty years of field refinement has produced three field-tested frameworks, each with a measurable track record.
Pre-project governance: backing only the initiatives worth backing
Most organizations greenlight too many projects, too early, on too little evidence. The IpOp Model is a structured framework for pre-project analysis that forces rigorous evaluation before resources are committed. Its conceptual architecture was a primary inspiration for ISO 56007, the international standard on Managing Opportunities and Ideas, unanimously adopted in 2023 by 42 countries. The framework is sufficiently complete to have been encoded into a dedicated software — IpOp Tools (ipoptools.com) — which guides pre-project analysis and produces decision-ready outputs aligned with ISO 56007 recommendations. Cohen has applied the methodology across more than 300 intrapreneurial projects in organizations ranging from Airbus and Microsoft to startups.
His books Concevoir et lancer un projet (Eyrolles 2008, 2016), Winning Opportunities (2011), Pre-Project Excellence (Springer, 2024), and Exzellenz schon in der Vorprojektphase (Springer, 2026) give decision-makers and project managers the full operational toolkit, available in French, English, German, and Spanish.
“Our intrapreneurs confirmed that the IpOp Model improved their ability to analyze innovation projects in a more holistic manner and changed the way they look at their projects.”
Fostered engagement and psychological safety: from aspiration to measurable KPIs
Fostered engagement does not improve by telling managers to be more empathetic. It improves when fostered engagement — the share of engagement directly generated by managerial behavior — is measured as an indicator of their own performance, when governance structures make equity enforceable, and when psychological safety is built into the system rather than left to individual goodwill. Cohen’s Fair & Caring Leadership framework does precisely that — and his 2026 book La sécurité psychologique en entreprise makes the governance case in full: when legacy governance structures undermine psychological safety, fixing the governance is needed to complement the improvement of leadership skills.
The framework is operational, not aspirational. The Fostered Engagement Index (FEI) — available at eazymirror.com/FEI — translates it into measurable KPIs that organizations can deploy independently to verify that managers obtain the best performance from their team.
His books Les leviers de l’engagement (Eyrolles, 2019), Driving Employee Engagement (Springer, 2026), and La sécurité psychologique en entreprise (GERESO, 2026) together provide a comprehensive framework integrating governance, leadership principles, and measurable indicators into a concrete management toolkit.
“The strength of Prof. Cohen is that he has always been both: entrepreneur and business angel on one side, professor and management thinker on the other. It is from this dual position that his concept of fair and caring leadership was born — a field in which he is today recognized as an essential contributor.”
MicroMBA / AgilityBooster: reinventing executive education
Cohen’s third contribution is methodological. Dissatisfied with executive education programs built around canned business cases and theoretical learning, he designed and personally delivers the MicroMBA/AgilityBooster around a single constraint: participants must identify, analyse, obtain buy-in for, and implement a real project inside their own organization — on top of their current job, without incubator support but with the personal mentoring of a seasoned entrepreneur.
The pedagogical consequence is radical. Participants learn to navigate organizational complexity beyond silos, better understand their organization and its strategy, build internal coalitions, substantially expand their network, and deliver under real constraints — the skills no business case simulation can teach. The financial consequence is equally concrete: the projects participants deliver generate returns that exceed the cost of the program itself, making it self-funding by design — a direct expression of the entrepreneurial logic he has practiced as a serial entrepreneur.
Across more than 70 cohorts in private and public sector organizations — from global corporations to industrial companies, banks, and public sector institutions — his approach to executive education has proven replicable across industries, cultures, and organizational sizes.
“His passionate and professional approach was a major reason for the program’s success. Raphaël went above and beyond to personally mentor every student. I cannot thank him enough for the contributions he has made to our business.”
The practitioner behind the frameworks
Cohen is a serial entrepreneur who has founded and led ventures across multiple industries on three continents — including a major Walt Disney licensee, fashion, software, trading, tourist attractions, construction, and financial derivatives. For more than twenty years, he has been an active business angel and board member, including of a Swiss bank. His client roster in executive education spans Airbus, Nestlé, Bühler, Sanofi, Microsoft, La Poste, SICPA, RTS, BCV, BCGE, HUG, and CHUV, across four continents.
He has published eight books in English, French, German, and Spanish — reaching over 40,000 readers — and contributes regularly to Harvard Business Review and Forbes.
Academically, he served as Academic Director MBA Europe and Clinical Professor of Global Business at Thunderbird School of Global Management, as Academic Co-Director of the EMBA Entrepreneurial Leadership specialization at the University of Geneva for twenty years (2001–2021) — earning the title of Academic Fellow — and designed and delivered the first entrepreneurship education program in Switzerland at EPFL. He also teaches in world-class institutions including ESCP Business School. He holds a Ph.D. and teaches in English and French.
Raphaël H Cohen brings to every engagement — keynote, boardroom, or classroom — the same combination: passion, rigorous frameworks, hard-won field experience, and the conviction that complex ideas, delivered with humor and brought to life through storytelling, are the ones that actually change behavior.
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