Building an entrepreneurial university community: Lessons from the University of Auckland

How can university entrepreneurship reach people who do not already identify as entrepreneurs?

In this episode, Naomi Bradshaw, Engagement Manager at the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship in the University of Auckland, explains how inclusive language, audience-specific stories, community-led design, and reciprocal partnerships have helped the centre broaden participation across students and staff.

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

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Summary

University entrepreneurship can struggle to reach beyond the people who already recognise themselves in its language. At the University of Auckland, participation in the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship has grown from around 800 people a year when Naomi Bradshaw joined to approximately 8.000 students and staff today. Naomi Bradshaw, Engagement Manager at the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, University of Auckland, attributes that reach to an approach that treats communication and community engagement as part of programme design.

The centre begins with a broad understanding of entrepreneurship, then adapts its language, examples, channels, and activities to the communities it hopes to serve. Relationships across faculties and with alumni, volunteers, mentors, and entrepreneurs extend that work beyond a single organisational hub. The result is a model in which engagement helps people enter entrepreneurship, shapes what the centre offers, and builds the support required to sustain it.

A broader definition creates more ways to participate

The centre understands entrepreneurship as a capability that can support many career paths. Venture creation remains part of its work, alongside a wider emphasis on recognising opportunities, solving problems, and creating value. That value can be economic, social, or environmental, giving students and staff several points of connection with the idea.

We talk around entrepreneurship as really seeing opportunities, solving problems, and creating value.

This framing matters because the public image of entrepreneurship can deter the very people an inclusive programme hopes to reach. Naomi sees a growing association between entrepreneurship and a narrow group of highly visible technology founders. Students may instead arrive at university identifying as scientists, artists, educators, or people who want to contribute to their communities. Asking them to adopt an entrepreneurial identity immediately can create an unnecessary barrier.

The centre therefore starts with the aspirations people already hold. A programme may invite students to become changemakers, develop an initiative, or address a problem they care about. Entrepreneurship becomes the means through which they can act on an existing motivation. This approach also reflects the centre’s belief that innovation depends on people with different knowledge, skills, and backgrounds contributing together.

To be innovative, you need a diversity of knowledge and skills and backgrounds to really create something new.

The breadth is supported by access. Although the centre originated within the business school, its programmes have always been free and open to students and staff from every faculty. Its mixture of curricular and largely co-curricular activity also creates room to test and refine different forms of participation.

Engagement begins with identity, context, and access

Reaching diverse communities requires more than distributing the same message widely. Naomi and her colleagues consider how different audiences understand themselves, where they receive information, and which examples will make an opportunity feel relevant. A student in arts may see a different participant story from a student in science, while an academic is more likely to encounter the experience of another researcher who has combined entrepreneurship with an established career.

The centre deliberately tells stories from different stages of development. Major funding rounds can demonstrate scale, but an early-career example may feel more attainable to a 19-year-old student. Naomi also highlights academics who began entrepreneurial work later in life. One recent example concerned an earthquake engineering professor who entered entrepreneurship at 55 and subsequently built a multinational company alongside his academic career.

Listening can also change the programme itself. A Māori student who joined a centre-funded visit to Silicon Valley valued the experience but felt that its assumptions about purpose and community did not speak to Māori perspectives. She proposed a programme based in New Zealand that would explore the country’s Māori innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem. The centre worked with her to design it and has since delivered the programme for three years.

Listening, responding and designing based on the needs of your community is really important.

The example shows engagement operating as a source of institutional learning. It asks a centre to recognise when a prominent external model does not translate directly to a particular community and to give participants a meaningful role in developing an alternative.

Relationships prevent the centre from becoming an island

Entrepreneurship centres can offer many programmes while remaining disconnected from the wider university. Naomi approaches this risk systematically. She maps stakeholders, student communities, faculty contacts, university services, communication channels, and potential partners. The resulting network helps the centre understand where people already gather, who can advocate for its work, and what motivates each group to participate.

Some relationships must be rebuilt regularly. Student leaders change as people graduate, and the academic calendar creates recurring windows in which communication and collaboration are more effective. Engagement therefore requires continued attention rather than a one-off stakeholder exercise. Faculty champions are especially valuable because they can interpret local priorities, provide access to communities, and challenge the assumption that entrepreneurship belongs primarily to business disciplines.

External relationships are equally central. More than 300 volunteers support the centre each year as speakers, mentors, competition judges, and contributors in other roles. Alumni remain part of the community after graduation: The centre follows their progress, celebrates developments in their ventures, connects them with others, and offers continued support. Over time, some return to contribute their own experience.

We always think of the relationship as a genuine relationship and not transactional.

These relationships strengthen the educational experience. Students and staff gain access to practising innovators who can offer practical insight, connections, and informed challenge. Naomi points to Kami, an education technology company founded by two engineers and an arts student. A mentor joined the venture as a co-founder, helping the team progress more quickly. The company is now used in 90% of K-12 schools in the United States and was valued at more than $300 million, according to the example Naomi shared.

Measurement supports learning and institutional trust

The centre uses evidence at several timescales. Individual programmes are reviewed through measures including satisfaction, net promoter scores, and an entrepreneurial mindset survey used with longer activities. Those findings allow the team to hold itself accountable and revise its offer from year to year.

Longer-term tracking captures outcomes that may take many years to emerge. The centre conducts an annual audit of alumni, drawing on professional profiles and venture databases to examine capital raised, jobs created, and the progress of companies. Across its 23-year history, participants have raised more than 8 billion in capital, according to the centre’s tracking.

The purpose extends beyond reporting success. Programme-level feedback identifies where the participant experience can improve, while longitudinal evidence reveals the pace and trajectory of entrepreneurial outcomes. Stories drawn from that progress can then help future participants imagine their own route into entrepreneurship.

Measurement also gives the centre a basis for explaining its value. Its programmes are offered free of charge, so the team must demonstrate why the university, government, and other funders should continue to invest. Evidence connects the centre’s inclusive mission with observable participation, learning, and venture development without reducing success to a single commercial metric.

A clear vision turns activity into a long-term strategy

Inclusive engagement does not remove the need for strategic direction. The centre’s stated ambition is to contribute to a more prosperous New Zealand, with prosperity understood in social, economic, and environmental terms. That north star helps the team decide which communities it should reflect, which partnerships it should cultivate, and how its activities fit together.

Understand the vision and then work out a plan to communicate it.

Naomi argues that an institution must first reach agreement about its intention, then translate that intention into one-, two-, five-, and ten-year plans. This gives relationship-building a purpose beyond expanding participation numbers. The work becomes a route towards a defined form of value for the university and its wider community.

Long-term planning must still leave room for iteration. The centre expects some approaches to fail and treats adjustment as part of practising the entrepreneurial mindset it teaches.

We need to be entrepreneurial ourselves, right? We need to be able to accept that we can fail fast, learn, develop, iterate.

This combination of direction and responsiveness makes the community part of the strategy. At the University of Auckland, engagement informs how entrepreneurship is explained, where it is offered, whose experience is represented, and what the centre learns from its results.

An entrepreneurial university community develops when people can recognise a place for themselves and influence the opportunities available to them. Naomi Bradshaw’s experience shows how a broad definition, context-sensitive design, reciprocal relationships, and sustained measurement can turn engagement into the infrastructure that supports participation over time.

Ready for more?

Creating an entrepreneurial university community is about much more than supporting start-ups. It requires helping people see themselves as contributors, building inclusive environments where they belong, and developing the confidence and mindset needed to turn ideas into action.

• Building a generation of changemakers: The UC Entrepreneurship Model explores how the University of Canterbury is creating a values-driven entrepreneurship ecosystem that helps students develop confidence, build community, and see themselves as agents of change.
• Demystifying entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship education examines why entrepreneurship is often misunderstood and how universities can broaden participation by presenting it as a mindset and capability relevant across disciplines, professions and life paths.

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