Andrea Belk Olson

Trained as a behavioral scientist and customer-centricity expert, Andrea helps companies better understand their customers through behavioral economics. She also speaks from the stage, teaching others the art and science of customer understanding. An avid writer and published author, Olson is a contributing writer on a spectrum of customer behavior, organizational culture, and leadership topics for Entrepreneur Magazine, Rotman Magazine, and Chief Executive Magazine, to name a few. Her work has spawned two books, 100+ published articles, and 4 contributing author roles.

She is a 4-time ADDY award winner, a visiting lecturer at the University of Iowa, Director of the Hawkeye Startup Incubator, a TEDx presenter, and TEDx speaker coach. She invented the 3W Ideation® process for identifying undiscovered needs by studying customer context, motivators, and biases.

Olson began her career at a tech startup fresh out of college. Learning on the fly and without a net, she helped build a company from $10k in seed monies to a multi-million dollar organization in only 8 years. In that time, she learned everything essential to grow a successful business, from sales to coding to accounting. Olson then moved onto a new role as the first female corporate executive at a $700m global manufacturing company, leading digital strategy, marketing & communications. Managing 10 business units across 12 countries garnered her the opportunity to study customer behavior across varying cultures. This sparked her focus on research and study in the burgeoning field of behavioral economics. ‍

Over the next 10 years, Olson continued to expand her education, including at the University of Toronto and the Rochester Institute of Technology, building on her foundation in Psychology and Communications at the University of Iowa. Founding the first customer-centricity and behavioral economics consulting firm in Iowa, she now works with a wide range of organizations across the financial, insurance, non-profit, and A/C/E industries.