The university as a catalyst: Knowledge, ecosystems and impact

What makes a university genuinely entrepreneurial?

Marcelo Tedesco, Founder and Executive Director of Global Ecosystem Dynamics and Director of Research in Economics & Society at the Buenos Aires Institute of Technology, argues for putting knowledge before venture counts. He explores how transdisciplinary learning, purposeful collaboration, and ecosystem responsibility allow universities to create wider societal value.

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Summary

Entrepreneurial universities are frequently judged by the ventures they produce, the employment outcomes they report, and the programmes they build around commercialisation. Marcelo Tedesco, Founder and Executive Director of Global Ecosystem Dynamics and Director of Research in Economics & Society at the Buenos Aires Institute of Technology, believes this emphasis risks subordinating knowledge to market demand. A university’s deeper role is to create a space for knowledge-sharing, critical thinking, experimentation, and discovery, then help that knowledge reach society through the route best suited to it.

Entrepreneurship remains valuable within that model, but it serves a wider purpose. Marcelo’s research into economic ecosystems also shows why the distinction matters beyond curriculum design. Universities create greater value when knowledge sits close to the centre of collaborative networks and can move easily between different actors. Becoming a catalyst therefore depends on the university’s purpose, the connections it builds, and its willingness to advance the ecosystem alongside its own institution.

Knowledge gives the university its distinctive purpose

Marcelo is concerned by language that presents universities as factories for employees or entrepreneurs. Technical training centres can play an important role in preparing people for defined forms of work, but he sees the university as a different kind of institution. Its purpose includes developing the intellectual freedom and critical capacity required to challenge established ideas and create new ones.

This principle affects what students encounter in their education. Marcelo has observed a trend in Latin America towards entrepreneurship degrees and the replacement of philosophy, methodology, and epistemology with more technical classes. He supports entrepreneurial culture, while questioning efforts to make a particular entrepreneurial path compulsory for all students.

His concern is that a curriculum shaped too closely around immediate market needs can narrow the capabilities universities are uniquely placed to develop. Students may eventually pursue a corporate career, create a venture, publish research, or apply ideas in a social setting. Their education should first equip them to discover, reason, and solve problems, leaving several routes open for how they contribute afterwards.

Entrepreneurship carries knowledge towards use

Research and discovery create value only when knowledge can travel. Marcelo identifies several routes: publication, patents, social application, and the market. Entrepreneurship becomes relevant when a student or researcher chooses to carry an idea into the market and needs institutional support to develop a venture.

That support should be available without turning venture creation into the expected destination for every learner. An incubator, accelerator, or entrepreneurial programme can provide infrastructure at the moment it becomes useful. The measure of success begins with the knowledge or problem-solving capacity being advanced, rather than the number of founders produced.

Entrepreneurship is a vehicle to the impact.

This framing also changes the purpose of entrepreneurial culture. Universities can cultivate initiative, creativity, experimentation, and the confidence to act on ideas because these capabilities help people address difficult problems. Some graduates may use them within established organisations, others in research or public life, and some through companies of their own.

Marcelo contrasts this flexibility with compulsory entrepreneurship education. He points to the value of making humanities, arts, and social sciences part of a broad university education, including for students in scientific, engineering, or business fields. Exposure to different modes of thought strengthens the critical judgement that allows technical knowledge to be applied responsibly.

Collaboration creates a university’s gravitational pull

Global Ecosystem Dynamics uses the idea of a gravitational centre to describe an actor’s position within a network. In Marcelo’s explanation, actors with many collaborations and connections become increasingly able to form new links and transfer resources across an ecosystem. The university’s influence comes from this connective capacity.

His research has found universities near the centre of stronger innovation-driven ecosystems, allowing knowledge to travel more easily to other participants. In many Latin American and developing-country contexts studied by his team, universities appeared towards the periphery, creating greater difficulty in transferring knowledge through the network.

Without collaboration you don’t have an ecosystem, you have an ego system.

Moving closer to the centre cannot be achieved simply by adding more entrepreneurship programmes. The relevant question is how much collaboration a university produces for the benefit of the ecosystem. This includes relationships with industry and investors, as well as public institutions, other universities, communities, and the many additional actors that make up an economic and societal ecosystem.

The quality of the structure matters as much as individual partnerships. Isolated projects and bilateral relationships may create useful activity, while a robust ecosystem depends on sustained connections among multiple participants. Marcelo also highlights a foundational challenge: universities that struggle to collaborate with each other will find it difficult to strengthen the wider network around them.

Ecosystem value should guide institutional ambition

Universities understandably seek talent, visibility, resources, and influence. Marcelo argues that pursuing those outcomes directly can push institutions into competition with the ecosystem they intend to support. Programmes designed primarily to attract entrepreneurs and innovators may concentrate value inside the university instead of strengthening the environment around it.

An ecosystem-centred approach begins by contributing value to the wider network. Stronger relationships and reciprocal benefits can follow from that contribution, giving the university a more consequential position without making institutional prominence the original motivation.

We add value to the ecosystem; as a consequence, we receive reciprocal value.

This calls for alignment between the university’s own mission and the needs of the society and economy of which it forms part. Marcelo sees the advancement of knowledge and the solution of major human problems as institutional interests in their own right. When that purpose shapes strategy, ecosystem responsibility does not sit alongside the university’s ambition as a competing demand. It defines the ambition.

The distinction also offers a more demanding test of university activity. An incubator or training programme may be excellent, yet its value depends on whether it expands capability and addresses needs across the ecosystem. The same principle applies to research, engagement, and other initiatives: their institutional importance grows through the contribution they enable beyond organisational boundaries.

Transdisciplinary universities connect ideas before they connect ecosystems

External collaboration requires internal collaboration. Marcelo describes the university itself as an ecosystem, one that can be weakened when departments and disciplines operate separately. Problems facing society rarely fit within one academic field, so advanced knowledge depends on dialogue across disciplinary boundaries.

His own work illustrates that combination. Global Ecosystem Dynamics examines an economic problem through a social-science perspective, uses methodology associated with anthropology, applies complex network analysis originating in physics, and draws on a theoretical framework used in biology. Each discipline contributes a different way of seeing and analysing the same system.

Universities can support this approach by creating more exchange between departments, protecting broad learning, and organising structures that allow ideas to move internally. A student developing new knowledge in chemistry, physics, engineering, or another field should also be able to access support when they decide to bring an idea into society or the market.

That sequence preserves exploration while enabling application. It also links the university’s educational role with its ecosystem role: critical and transdisciplinary learning creates stronger ideas, while collaborative infrastructure gives those ideas multiple paths towards use.

The entrepreneurial university can become a powerful catalyst when it keeps knowledge at the centre, connects disciplines, and directs its partnerships towards shared challenges. For Marcelo Tedesco, the lasting measure of such an institution lies in the knowledge and problem-solving capacity it helps society mobilise, regardless of whether the people carrying that work forward become researchers, employees, founders, or something else entirely.

Ready for more?

Universities play a unique role in society when they create, connect, and apply knowledge to address complex challenges. Marcelo Tedesco’s perspective reminds us that entrepreneurship is not an end in itself, but one of many pathways through which knowledge can create value and impact.

This article is part of UIIN’s Future of Universities Thoughtbook | Entrepreneurship Edition, a collection of perspectives from university leaders, researchers, entrepreneurs, and innovators exploring how higher education can evolve to meet the challenges and opportunities of the future. Discover the full collection and learn how institutions around the world are rethinking entrepreneurship, innovation, leadership, engagement, and societal impact.

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