Building the entrepreneurial university: Leadership lessons from Aalto’s Founding President

How can university leaders encourage entrepreneurship without trying to control it from the top?

For this episode, we spoke with Tuula Teeri, Professor of Biotechnology and former President of Aalto University, about how Aalto supported bottom-up entrepreneurship through strategic investment, participatory leadership, visible recognition, and long-term commitment. Her experience offers practical lessons for leaders seeking to turn academic autonomy into institutional momentum.

You can read a summary below, and listen to the full interview in our podcast:

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Summary

Entrepreneurial universities cannot be created through a collection of centrally designed initiatives. Tuula Teeri, Professor of Biotechnology and former President of Aalto University, saw that while leading the institution from 2010 to 2018. Aalto brought together three autonomous Finnish universities, combining different disciplines, communities, and expectations. Its entrepreneurial identity grew from a deliberate goal, yet many of its most recognisable expressions emerged through the work of students and academics.

That experience reveals a central challenge in university leadership. Academic freedom gives universities much of their creative capacity, while also making shared change difficult to direct. Tuula’s approach was to establish a clear destination, recruit people who could advance it, and create the conditions in which strong ideas could grow. Building an entrepreneurial university therefore required leadership that was decisive about purpose and patient about how the culture developed.

Academic autonomy provides the raw material

Tuula sees an entrepreneurial instinct within academic work itself. Professors are independent, deeply invested in their work, and accustomed to developing and defending their own ideas. That autonomy can create resistance to institutional direction, but it also supplies the initiative on which an entrepreneurial culture depends.

The freedom of people to do what they think is important and what they can do is a strength in universities, and this is what we used for the entrepreneurial activities.

At Aalto, the leadership team did not have to invent entrepreneurship from nothing. It could look to activity already present across the predecessor institutions. Tuula points to product development teaching led by Professor Kalevi Ekman since 1996, in which students worked through problems and opportunities with international partners. Aalto later invested resources, space, and support in the work, helping it develop into Design Factory and expand far beyond its original setting.

The same principle applied to the student-led movement around entrepreneurship. Students embraced the ambition to become an entrepreneurial university, created the Aalto Entrepreneurship Society, and developed activities in their own style. They took professors on visits to Stanford and assumed responsibility for Slush, shaping an event whose format could never have been designed in quite the same way by university leadership. The institution’s role was to recognise the energy, reduce unnecessary distance between students and senior leaders, and allow credible initiatives to advance.

Direction and resources allow strong ideas to grow

Autonomy became productive because Aalto had a stated ambition and made choices around it. Tuula describes several attempts to create activity from the top that failed, while bottom-up initiatives gained momentum. The lesson was to retain leadership and use institutional purpose as a basis for selecting and supporting work that moved in the right direction.

We tried all kinds of things, from top-down, which never worked, and then these bottom-up initiatives just took more and more space, and worked much better.

That selection involved judgement. Some initiatives were eventually stopped, while others received more space and funding. Design Factory attracted criticism because of the resources directed towards it, but Tuula defended the investment on the grounds that the team was doing excellent work aligned with Aalto’s aims. Strategic concentration mattered more than distributing support evenly.

The same discipline shaped recruitment. Creating a new institution began with Tuula assembling a leadership team that combined respected academics, people involved in the merger’s preparation, and specialists from outside the university in areas such as finance and human resources. She made the freedom to recruit that team a condition of accepting the presidency.

Nobody can do this kind of thing alone.

Recruitment continued to be treated as a long-term institutional decision. Faculty committees were expected to identify talent without compromising standards, while new professors could negotiate the equipment and resources needed to establish their work. Empowerment depended on practical support: People needed the authority to act and a realistic opportunity to succeed.

Participation turns criticism into responsibility

The merger began in a divided environment. Some people saw its potential, others expected it to fail, and universities elsewhere in Finland resented the additional resources Aalto had received. Tuula inherited plans she believed in, as well as a network of around 500 people who had helped prepare the new institution. Those early supporters became important advocates within a community of roughly 2,000 faculty and staff and 20,000 students.

Participation was essential because academics could not simply be instructed to adopt the change. Tuula created a professors’ council to provide a forum that the new governance structure lacked. Its early meetings drew little interest and considerable criticism, prompting her to establish a clear expectation.

I’m quite happy to listen to your problems. But I will only act if you have a suggestion how can we do it better.

The response gradually changed the nature of the discussion. Criticism remained welcome, while responsibility for improving the institution became shared. Aalto Leaders Dialogue extended that involvement across leadership levels, enabling people in departments and teams to discuss the changes and translate them into their own environments.

You have to make them part of the change. You have to make them want this change, otherwise it doesn’t work.

Senior appointments reinforced the same process. Once deans supported the direction of the merger, they could recruit department heads able to carry it further into the schools. Complete agreement was never a realistic measure of progress. Tuula looked instead for a point at which enthusiasm outweighed opposition and the university could deliver against its plans.

Culture is built through visible, practical support

Aalto’s leadership team chose pride as an early indicator of whether the merger was succeeding. They wanted people to feel that belonging to the university meant something, and they reinforced that feeling by making achievement visible. Research centres, student initiatives, and other successes were recognised publicly and celebrated across the institution.

We know that we are going to be succeeding in this if the people feel pride in belonging to this university.

Recognition connected individual effort with institutional progress. It showed people that successful work would be noticed and helped create a more positive environment around change. Tuula paired it with personal presence. Despite the university’s scale, she joined major discussions, attended leadership dialogues, visited every department over approximately a year and a half, met key professors, welcomed new recruits, and held exit discussions with people who left.

This visibility was supported by trust and delegation. Tuula quickly recognised that a president could not manage the detail of an institution that size. Her role became advocating for the change, internally and externally, while relying on the leadership team and others throughout the university to carry responsibility.

Support also shaped Aalto’s response when capable people encountered setbacks. Established researchers whose major funding ended could receive bridge funding while pursuing the next opportunity. New professors were offered resources that gave them a stronger start. These decisions reduced avoidable failure without pretending that every initiative would succeed.

When they fail, it’s not the end of the world. Try again.

University transformation requires a longer horizon

Aalto translated its ambitions into a roadmap of around ten priorities, with progress planned over approximately a decade. Even that horizon was short compared with the timescale on which Tuula believes universities create value. Their contribution emerges through education, research, talent, companies, and innovations whose origins may become invisible long before their effects are fully recognised.

The quarter in a university is 25 years, not a quarter of a year.

This long view has consequences for leadership and funding. Universities cannot be expected to build major research capacity one day and reduce it sharply the next without damaging their ability to create long-term value. Tuula argues that philanthropy can provide greater stability when it is used strategically and kept separate from control over academic activity. At Aalto, returns from the university’s endowment helped balance reductions in government funding while preserving the underlying capital.

Financial resilience also protects the university as an institution. Tuula is concerned by political attitudes that overlook the long-term value of higher education and by the economic pressure that follows declining public support. Defending universities therefore involves explaining their contribution more effectively and building funding models capable of absorbing change.

The history of university-created talent and enterprise can help make that contribution visible. Tuula points to the engineers educated by Aalto’s predecessor institutions and the University of Oulu who helped build Nokia. Such examples remind communities that entrepreneurship already has deep roots within universities, while setting honest expectations about pace. For Tuula Teeri, leaders can strengthen those roots by choosing a direction, backing capable people, and sustaining the conditions in which their work can mature.

Ready for more?

If you’re interested in how universities can transform themselves to thrive in a rapidly changing world, explore these related insights:

• The future university: Engine of innovation, talent & societal impact – A thought-provoking exploration of how universities can become stronger drivers of innovation, entrepreneurship and societal progress.
• What if we designed the university from scratch? Lessons from Minerva – Discover how reimagining higher education from first principles can unlock new approaches to learning, leadership and institutional design.

Stay tuned for the next episode on this series and don’t forget to follow us on your preferred podcast platform!