Shining the light: A new vision for entrepreneurial universities

UIIN’s Future of Universities Thoughtbook series brings together leading voices to reimagine the role of universities in society. The Entrepreneurial Edition features 35 contributions from 18 countries and explores how institutions can evolve into adaptive, impact-driven and entrepreneurial ecosystems. Professor Joe Steensma, Director of Entrepreneurship in Public Health at Washington University in St. Louis, offers his perspective informed by work at the intersection of research, innovation and societal need.

A scientist and entrepreneur, Joe has founded and led ventures that translate research into public health innovation. His work centres on the intersections of economics, environmental degradation and health, alongside teaching in environmental health, biostatistics and climate-related public health.

Under the microscope 

When I was a freshman in college (in fact, my very first week in botany class), I had my first opportunity to look through a high-quality microscope. I had used microscopes before, but this one was different; it had clarity, precision, and power that I had never experienced. I placed a slide under the lens and adjusted the focus. Slowly, the invisible came into view. Cells, organelles, even chromosomes. Whole structures I had only read about were suddenly right in front of me. The magnification made the invisible visible—and that alone was amazing.

But what truly blew my mind wasn’t the magnification. It was the light.

This microscope had a switch that let me change the type of light shining through the slide. I started with polarised light, and certain things jumped into focus. Then I switched to phase contrast, and those things disappeared, replaced by entirely new structures I hadn’t seen before. When I changed to incandescent light, I saw still more things that had been completely hidden just moments earlier.

These weren’t just sharper images—they were entirely different structures, visible only under certain forms of light. That experience changed how I thought about seeing and knowing—that the truth was really in the perspective. It taught me the benefit of being armed with many “types of light”.

The light 

That moment has stayed with me ever since, and it serves as a metaphor for what higher education is and what it needs to become. Yes, magnification matters—we need to look closely and develop expertise—but we also need different kinds of “light,” i.e., scholars who can shift perspectives and reveal what would otherwise remain hidden.

Modern higher education has become overly focused on magnification. Students are encouraged to specialise, to double major, to develop depth in a single discipline. We train them to become experts.

While there is value in that kind of focus, it can also leave students blind to the broader context of the problems they are trying to solve. They may see clearly within a narrow band but miss the larger patterns, systems, and consequences.

In my view, the entrepreneurial university of the future must teach students both to magnify and shift perspective, gathering many different forms of light, and directing it boldly and with purpose.

Depth as well as width

I’ve been fortunate to have some success as an entrepreneur. I don’t measure that success by financial returns, but by the impact my ventures have had on real problems that affect people and communities. Interestingly, I never took a business class or formally studied entrepreneurship. And while many of my ventures have been grounded in science, it wasn’t scientific training alone that prepared me to solve problems.

What helped me was the ability to understand the interconnectedness of things. The problems we face are rarely isolated; they are tangled, systemic, and deeply human. And solving them requires seeing the whole picture, not just a narrow slice of it. That’s a theme I’ve seen repeated again and again among successful entrepreneurs: the ability to perceive how a solution might ripple through other parts of society.

This is why I believe entrepreneurial universities must look to the past. A true liberal arts education—a broad, curiosity-driven exploration of multiple fields—offers a model we need to reclaim. It was never about checking boxes, but about developing the capacity to think across domains, see connections, and ask better questions. It helped students gather many forms of light.

That breadth of vision is exactly what entrepreneurship requires.

Entrepreneurs are those who undertake

Entrepreneurship is about venturing into the unknown. It’s about being bold enough to enter uncharted territory and curious enough to explore it deeply. At its root, the word “entrepreneur” means “one who undertakes.” As such, they are discoverers, explorers, intrepid souls with a compulsion to use every asset they have to solve problems.

Universities must embrace that spirit and encourage exploration across disciplines, rewarding the integration of ideas, and equipping students to navigate complexity. It must help students gather light from science, philosophy, engineering, ethics, economics, art, and beyond—and then teach them how to shine that light with purpose into the places that are most in need of clarity.

This vision of education changes how we structure learning. It demands that we create space for interdisciplinary inquiry and that we measure success by more than credentials or job placement. It asks us to value imagination as much as information. And it requires that we reframe rigour, not as depth alone, but as the ability to consider multiple perspectives and multiple outcomes.

Preparing for lives of consequence

This doesn’t mean we abandon technical skill or specialised knowledge; it means we complement them with breadth, balancing it with curiosity, and pairing expertise with empathy.

If we do that, we‘ll be training people for jobs as well as preparing them for lives of consequence. We’ll be developing the kinds of thinkers and doers who can lead through uncertainty, connect ideas that others miss, and offer solutions that are as wise as they are effective.

So if you ask me what the future of higher education looks like, I’ll tell you this: the entrepreneurial university of the future will be the one that teaches its students to gather many forms of light and to shine that light in order to develop a fulsome understanding of the complex challenges faced by society. Paradoxically, I believe that the best way to do so might not come from developing some new pedagogical approach. It may come from looking back.

Historically, universities were places of wide-ranging curiosity and bold exploration across disciplines. As a young scholar, Isaac Newton invented calculus not as part of a course syllabus, but to answer a previously unanswerable question: why do planets move in ellipses instead of perfect circles? Newton developed a new field of mathematics to illuminate a problem from a (seemingly) totally different field of inquiry!

That kind of curiosity-driven, problem-centred scholarship, rooted in a desire to understand the world more fully, is exactly what we need to revive. The future will belong to institutions that remember what the earliest universities already knew: discovery happens when thinkers are free to explore, connect ideas, and shine light into the unknown.

Maybe… Just maybe… If we can harness the power of light, we can travel back to a time when education was focused on developing problem solvers, armed with many forms of light, as opposed to people with “answers” armed with magnification. Such a revival of education would serve enterprise, society, and our planet very well. In my opinion, it cannot happen soon enough.

Ready for more?

3ID Labs is redefining education by fostering interdisciplinary collaboration, active learning, and real-world problem-solving. Uncover the essence of the entrepreneurial mindset in our podcast episode Empowering innovators and discovering their potential at 3ID Labs, as we explore the journey of students navigating through diverse challenges, guided by the knowledge of external stakeholders.

Joseph Steensma (author) is a Professor and the Director of Entrepreneurship in Public Health at Washington University in St- Louis.