How to make a university future-ready: Leadership lessons from Santiago Iñiguez

How can universities become more agile without losing the values that give education its purpose?

In this episode of our podcast, Santiago Iñiguez, President of IE University, shares lessons on entrepreneurial governance, internationalisation, faculty development, and lifelong learning. He also explains why the rise of AI makes human judgement, character, and personal relationships even more central to higher education.

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

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Summary

Universities are designed to protect continuity. Their governance, traditions, and checks and balances preserve independence and academic standards, yet the same structures can slow decisions when technology, professional needs, and society are changing quickly. Santiago Iñiguez, President of IE University, argues that future readiness depends on an institution’s ability to move with greater speed while retaining a clear sense of what education is for.

His experience at IE suggests that agility and tradition can reinforce one another when both serve a coherent purpose. Entrepreneurial governance helps a university anticipate change, internationalisation expands the perspectives available to its community, and technology creates new possibilities for learning. Philosophy, the humanities, and close human relationships give those choices direction. The result is a model of institutional change grounded in enduring values rather than novelty alone.

Philosophy turns institutional choices into purposeful action

For Santiago, university leadership begins with the values behind decisions. Strategy may appear to concern structures, markets, programmes, and resources, but every significant choice also expresses a view of the world and of the good life. Philosophy helps leaders recognise those assumptions and understand how they influence relationships with students, faculty, staff, and external stakeholders.

Management is philosophy in action.

This perspective matters when institutions face pressure to modernise. A university can adopt new technology, launch new programmes, or change its governance without first deciding which human and societal outcomes those moves should support. Philosophy provides the connective tissue between disciplines and helps an institution give meaning to action across them.

Santiago’s emphasis on virtue ethics brings this purpose into the learning experience. He sees virtues as habits developed through repeated behaviour, with education helping students find a productive balance between extremes. Pride, for example, can support leadership, while excess becomes arrogance. Empathy, integrity, humility, courage, and resilience therefore belong within professional preparation because graduates will carry their judgement into organisations and society.

This gives the humanities a practical role in a university’s future. As access to information and analytical capability expands, students still need to examine values, character, and responsibility. These disciplines help universities prepare capable professionals who can decide how knowledge should be used.

Entrepreneurial governance creates room to anticipate change

Academic institutions tend towards conservatism for understandable reasons. Tenure, collective decision-making, and formal checks and balances can protect impartiality and independence. Santiago also sees a cost: innovation can be impeded and decisions delayed at precisely the moment when universities need to respond more quickly.

The first decision that we adopted was actually designing something, an organization which could act in a very entrepreneurial way, in an agile way.

IE’s response was to build an organisation capable of acting entrepreneurially and with agility. This involved recruiting academics who combined disciplinary expertise with a passion for teaching, a willingness to build the institution, and an ambition to improve the wider world. Santiago views talent selection as one of the most consequential decisions a university can make because institutional aspirations ultimately depend on people prepared to advance them.

Entrepreneurship also influences how a university relates to opportunities. Santiago recalls an international agency describing IE Business School as successful but “opportunistic”. He came to see the label as a compliment: an institution that teaches managers to recognise change and act on it should demonstrate that capacity itself.

What I encourage universities is actually to preserve the traditions, their spirit, their vision and mission, but at the same time seize the opportunities.

That approach positions the university within society rather than apart from it. Entrepreneurial behaviour is valuable when it helps the institution respond to real needs, solve relevant problems, and keep its educational mission connected to the environment around it.

International breadth and the humanities prepare cosmopolitan professionals

IE’s international orientation was established before Madrid had become the international centre it is today. The aim extended beyond assembling a diverse student body, faculty, and staff. Santiago wanted the institution to develop an outlook shaped by the world as its field of action.

The university now brings together 160 nationalities on campus. For Santiago, this diversity is educational: it exposes students to different visions of the world and different conceptions of a good life. Even as the language of globalisation has become contested, he believes universities still need to educate cosmopolitan professionals who can work across borders and perspectives.

Internationalisation is paired with professional learning and the humanities. Practitioners bring current experience into the classroom, while philosophy and related disciplines help students interpret that experience, question its assumptions, and consider its consequences. The combination prepares graduates to operate in complex settings without reducing education to technical competence.

Santiago’s imagined university on Mars makes this balance more visible. Designing an institution for an entirely new environment would demand innovation and international cooperation, yet its educational foundations would still draw on inherited values. The thought experiment points back to universities on Earth: future readiness requires a capacity to adapt alongside a strong understanding of what deserves to endure.

Personal relationships move learning from intelligence to wisdom

The availability of knowledge through digital platforms changes the contribution faculty make. Santiago argues that professors cannot define their role primarily through the authoritative delivery of information. Their value increasingly lies in orchestrating learning and helping students turn abundant intelligence into wiser judgement.

He sees personal attention as central to that work. In his strategy courses, Santiago sets aside time for one-to-one conversations about students’ ambitions, professional plans, families, and possible moves to other countries. Those exchanges reveal needs and motivations that remain hidden in a group setting, allowing the educational experience to become more personally transformative.

What we need is actually working on the wisdom of our students. That goes beyond and that has that human aspect which is essential.

This is also a leadership principle. Effective managers need to understand the people they lead, including their problems and ambitions. In the classroom, the same human knowledge helps faculty connect ideas to a student’s development rather than treating learning as the transfer of content.

AI makes this relational role more significant. When knowledge and analytical support are widely available, universities can place greater emphasis on critical thinking, empathy, character, and the ability to use intelligence responsibly. Santiago describes the task as a movement from intelligence towards wisdom, with faculty supporting the human dimension that technology cannot supply on its own.

Faculty development and lifelong learning extend the university’s relevance

Santiago encourages universities to make full use of AI rather than retreating from the digital world. Students and professionals are already using these tools, so faculty need to learn quickly where AI can strengthen different parts of the learning process. He expects the technology to replace tasks while enhancing the role of strong professors, consultants, lawyers, advisers, and leaders.

AI will facilitate and enhance the role of students and future professionals, but it won’t replace them.

Faculty preparation is therefore among his most urgent priorities for the next decade. Professors need to become skilled learning orchestrators, capable of adapting to changing knowledge and working with students in a more Socratic and personalised way. Achieving that shift will also require institutions, legislators, and regulators to remove barriers that inhibit experimentation and curricular renewal.

The same adaptive mindset applies to the people universities serve. Longer lives and continuous changes in work mean that education can no longer be concentrated primarily at the beginning of adulthood. Santiago expects people to return to learning regularly to update their knowledge and skills, making lifelong learning an increasingly important part of higher education.

IE’s executive education activity offers one response through degree, open, and customised programmes delivered across several regions. Its joint venture with the Financial Times, Headspring, combines executive education expertise with journalists and editorial thought leaders. The example illustrates how partnerships and varied formats can help universities reach professionals whose needs differ from those of school-leavers.

Future-ready institutions will still face regulation, consolidation, new technological models, and demands for greater scale. Santiago Iñiguez’s experience suggests that they can meet those pressures by aligning entrepreneurial action with a durable educational purpose: developing people who can use knowledge with judgement, character, and care.

Ready for more?

As universities navigate technological disruption, changing learner expectations, and growing societal challenges, questions about purpose, adaptability, and educational design become increasingly important.

• What if we designed the university from scratch? Lessons from Minerva explores how institutions can align learning, assessment, and organisational structures around the capabilities graduates need to thrive in an uncertain world.
• A new hope for the university: An engine of innovation, talent and societal impact invites readers to rethink the role of universities from first principles and consider how higher education can continue to drive innovation, talent development, and societal progress in the decades ahead.

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