Entrepreneurial leadership in higher education: How to build a more innovative university
An ambitious university strategy only matters when it changes how the institution works.
For this episode, we invited Pascale Quester, Vice-Chancellor and President of Swinburne University of Technology, to talk about how strategic focus, co-creation, innovation time, and industry-led research can turn institutional vision into action. Drawing on Swinburne’s transformation, she shows why lasting change depends on aligning a distinctive vision with the institution’s everyday choices and systems.
You can read a summary below, and listen to the full interview in our podcast:
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Summary
Entrepreneurial leadership in higher education is often expressed through ambitious visions, innovation programmes, and promises of transformation. Pascale Quester, Vice-Chancellor and President of Swinburne University of Technology, approaches it as a more demanding operating discipline. A university must understand what makes it distinctive, involve its community in shaping a shared direction, and make decisions that concentrate people and resources around that direction.
At Swinburne, this has meant using institutional strategy to guide choices about teaching, research, partnerships, staff workloads, and emerging technology. Pascale’s experience shows that an innovative university is built through alignment: A compelling story gives people a destination, while incentives, investment, and difficult decisions make that destination credible. Leadership becomes entrepreneurial when purpose influences how the institution works each day.
Distinctive leadership starts with institutional strengths
Pascale traces her own approach to her background in marketing and consumer behaviour. That perspective brought an unusual emphasis on understanding audiences, differentiating the institution, communicating value, and building relationships with business. Rather than imitating other university leaders, she drew on the expertise that had already shaped her career.
I think the key to leadership is draw on your strength and then leverage it and put it at the service of the mission that you’re trying to pursue.
The same principle applies at institutional level. Swinburne’s identity as a university of technology and a dual-sector institution gives it capabilities stretching from vocational education and apprenticeships to bachelor’s degrees, postgraduate study, and doctoral research. It also offers a basis for deciding where Swinburne can make a distinctive contribution.
Pascale argues that universities weaken this advantage when they assume that greater scale automatically creates greater value. Growth can become a mechanism for generating teaching revenue to support an expanding research portfolio, leaving institutions trying to cover more disciplines and attract more students. Her alternative is concentration: Pursue fewer areas with the potential for genuine excellence.
At Swinburne, those priorities include space, energy transition and sustainability, and medical technology. Each connects the university’s engineering, design, technology, and applied research strengths with identifiable needs. The resulting strategy defines where the institution will invest, as well as which worthwhile activities belong elsewhere.
Strategy earns its value through difficult choices
A strategy becomes useful when it can resolve competing demands. Pascale describes it as an “Excalibur”: A tool for testing attractive proposals against the institution’s chosen identity and ambitions.
I think that’s the strength of a good strategy, is that you use it as an Excalibur.
This requires leaders to withstand criticism. Pascale points to Swinburne’s decision to stop teaching languages and discontinue its support for traditional circus arts. Both fields have value, but neither aligned closely enough with the university’s technological focus. Releasing those commitments made it possible to invest more decisively in areas such as access to the Keck Observatory.
Clarity helps people understand the relationship between what ends and what becomes possible. Pascale frames these decisions around saying a more emphatic yes to the activities that can make Swinburne brilliant. Researchers can still pursue work beyond the main priority areas when they establish a compelling value proposition and secure external support for the research and their time. Institutional funding, however, follows the agreed strategy.
That discipline protects a university from treating every good idea as an obligation. Sustainable differentiation depends on recognising that other institutions can carry valuable work forward. For Pascale, entrepreneurial leadership therefore combines imagination with selection, ensuring that ambition is supported by the focus and execution needed to produce results.
Shared language turns change into collective work
Pascale arrived at Swinburne during Melbourne’s extended COVID-19 lockdown, when existing assumptions about university life had been disrupted. She used a technology platform to invite staff into the development of a new strategy, attracting participation from close to 80 per cent of the workforce and generating more than 5,000 pages of written input.
The format widened whose ideas could shape the institution. Junior teaching staff, professional staff, and Indigenous staff could contribute alongside senior research professors, without the loudest or most established voices automatically dominating. Pascale and her team then distilled those contributions into four “moonshots”, giving the university a memorable language for its ambitions.
The moonshots included work experience for every learner, employment for every graduate, a technology solution and workforce support for every industry partner, and a commitment to become a prototype of the university of the future. They gave a community that had lost some of its ability to dream a set of aspirations large enough to organise around, even before every route to achieving them was known.
Swinburne’s subsequent strategy extended the metaphor from reaching the moon to pursuing “quantum leaps”. The process again involved staff, students, overseas campuses, and industry partners, this time using AI to identify themes in a large volume of contributions before reflecting them back through forums and an expo. It gave the strategy wider authorship and helped people connect an institutional vision with their own roles.
Innovation needs time, permission, and consequences
Universities often encourage innovation while leaving workloads and promotion criteria unchanged. Swinburne introduced a 10 per cent innovation allocation into staff workloads and added innovation to its promotion system. These changes made experimentation an acknowledged part of academic work, whether it appeared in teaching, research, or venture creation.
Pascale describes innovation as a muscle that people must be able to exercise. Staff interested in developing a start-up could use their allocated time and enter an innovation studio to test whether an idea had merit and a market. Swinburne also created venture capital capability, enabling the university to invest directly in promising ideas and strengthen their prospects of attracting external funding.
If you want people to try things, you’ve got to allow them to fail as well.
That permission was reinforced through a Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Failing Forward. Teams could share what had failed and what they had learned, making experimentation visible without pretending that every attempt would succeed. When academics asked for the skills to participate, 300 joined the first iteration of an innovation training programme.
The broader workload model follows the same logic of alignment. Pascale rejects the assumption that every academic should divide their time identically between research, teaching, and administration. People have different strengths, and excellence in education deserves the same respect as excellence in research.
The rigidity of the workload model is probably the single most paralysing force in a university.
Flexibility still carries accountability. Researchers given more time for research are expected to create value for Swinburne, while educators are expected to be genuinely effective in supporting students. Entrepreneurial culture emerges when freedom, capability-building, recognition, and clear expectations reinforce one another.
Partnerships organise research around external value
Industry collaboration can also lose focus when funding simply allows researchers to continue work they had already planned. Pascale’s partnership model begins with understanding the problem an organisation is trying to solve, helping to define it clearly, and agreeing what useful progress will look like.
Listen to the problem that the industry partner is trying to solve, define it and reflect it back. Sometimes they’re not very good at defining the problem and they need some assistance to shape what it is that would actually help.
This attention to deliverables reflects the timescales on which partners operate. A proposal to fund doctoral students and wait four years for an answer offers limited immediate value. Swinburne therefore combines different forms of expertise and participation, including student engineering projects, where these can move a problem forward more quickly.
The Franco-Australian Centre for Energy Transition illustrates the approach. Designed as a collaborative workplace for industry and universities, it hosts projects that now attract at least 50% and sometimes 70%, of their funding from industry. Pascale treats that commitment as evidence that a partner sees enough value in the work to invest alongside the university.
This creates a demanding test for applied research. Academic quality alone does not establish that a proposed project addresses an industry need. Researchers must find organisations that recognise the problem, value the possible solution, and are prepared to contribute. The relationship then rests on a shared definition of success, visible progress, and confidence that the university can provide both technology and the people required to implement it.
Universities shape the future through the capabilities they develop and the technologies they help create. Pascale sees AI as a test of whether institutions can meet that responsibility: Students need to learn how to think, analyse, and create in an environment where these tools are present. For Pascale Quester, an entrepreneurial university faces such change directly, using a clear identity, collective ambition, and practical systems to turn uncertainty into purposeful action.
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