Beyond innovation rhetoric: What entrepreneurial university leadership really takes

What does it take to make innovation part of a university’s daily operating model?

In this week’s episode, Aleks Subic, Vice-Chancellor and CEO of Torrens University Australia, shares how clear purpose, distributed authority, aligned rewards, authentic engagement, and external partnerships can create an entrepreneurial culture. You can listen to the episode or read a summary of the conversation below:

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Summary

Universities can create innovation centres, entrepreneurship programmes, and high-profile precincts while leaving their underlying ways of working largely unchanged. Professor Aleks Subic, Vice-Chancellor and CEO of Torrens University Australia, sees entrepreneurial leadership as a deeper institutional task. It requires universities to create economic and social value through education, research, collaboration, and the way the organisation itself operates.

That distinction shifts attention from isolated initiatives towards the conditions that allow innovation to spread. Purpose must be clear, staff need authority to act within their domains, reward systems must reinforce the outcomes leaders describe, and external partners must become part of the university’s working environment. For Aleks, an entrepreneurial university emerges when these elements shape the daily experience of students, staff, and partners rather than remaining ambitions expressed by senior leaders.

Innovation rhetoric needs an institutional operating system

Entrepreneurial culture begins with language, but it cannot end there. Aleks argues that leaders first need to explain why a university should work differently. The reason might be to respond to opportunity with greater agility, address challenges more effectively, create value with partners, or deepen the institution’s societal impact. A clear purpose gives people context for the transformation being asked of them.

The institution must then align its systems with that purpose. Staff closest to the work often understand its constraints and possibilities most clearly, so they need a licence to innovate within their areas of responsibility. Reward, recognition, and communication also matter because they show which behaviours the university genuinely values. If entrepreneurial action is encouraged in speeches but overlooked in processes and career incentives, the institutional message becomes inconsistent.

What we value, what we celebrate, what we award is very important because that speaks to what we consider important.

This alignment turns innovation into a normal way of working. It influences how professional services operate, how academic teams collaborate, how decisions are made, and how the university seeks improvement. Organisational culture changes when entrepreneurship is experienced repeatedly through everyday choices.

It has to become your daily lived experience. This is who we are. This is how we operate. This is how we work.

The distinction matters because structural additions alone cannot transform a culture. Centres, institutes, and precincts can support the work, but their effect depends on whether the wider institution has also changed how it communicates, empowers people, and recognises contribution.

Direction and ownership meet in the happy middle

Distributed leadership does not remove responsibility from senior leaders. Aleks believes leadership must provide clarity of direction, purpose, approach, and intent. That clarity helps a complex university community understand the common objective and the broad direction of travel.

Ownership develops when the community participates in shaping how that objective will be achieved. Top-down leadership can establish the strategic purpose and key objectives, while staff across the university contribute domain knowledge, diverse ideas, practical experience, and the goodwill needed to translate direction into action. The two forms of leadership meet in what Aleks calls the happy middle.

The happy middle is where the magic happens.

Reaching it requires more than announcing a strategy. The university community needs opportunities to discuss, challenge, share, and co-own the common purpose. Each person can then lead within their own area while remaining aligned with an institutional direction that others understand.

The resulting model combines coherence with local initiative. Senior leaders hold responsibility for strategic clarity, while people nearer the work influence its implementation and improvement. This allows the university to draw on expertise distributed throughout the organisation without fragmenting its efforts into disconnected activity.

People need permission to share ideas before they are finished

Genuine ownership also depends on how safely people can contribute. Aleks describes universities as communities and places authentic engagement at the centre of transformation. Formal channels such as town halls, forums, team meetings, and emails matter, alongside informal discussions in corridors or over coffee. In each setting, people need to feel able to express positive and negative views respectfully and constructively.

Design thinking offers a way to turn this engagement into progress. Staff can identify a problem, help conceptualise possible responses, test prototypes, gather feedback, and continue improving the solution. Resistance or criticism then becomes information that the organisation can investigate rather than a signal to stop listening.

Early ideas are especially vulnerable. They may be incomplete, flawed, or difficult to communicate, and a strongly judgemental response can cause people to withdraw. Aleks encourages leaders to invite staff to share sooner and treats the development of a promising idea as a collective responsibility.

Don’t judge. Let your staff share their ideas and their views.

This principle changes the burden placed on the person who first notices an opportunity. They are not expected to arrive with a finished institutional solution. Leadership teams and colleagues can provide support, test the thinking, and help the idea mature. The organisation gains access to more of its internal knowledge because participation does not depend on individual confidence or the ability to perfect a proposal alone.

For Aleks, this collaborative responsibility is central to entrepreneurial leadership.

Success is a team sport.

Letting the outside in changes the institution

An entrepreneurial university also depends on close relationships with industry, business, and society. Aleks describes co-creation, co-delivery, and co-location as practical ways to blur organisational boundaries and expose the university to different perspectives, needs, and forms of expertise.

You need to let the outside in.

At Aston University, he established the Birmingham Innovation Precinct to bring businesses, professionals, and community groups into spaces across the campus. Their presence created a more diverse working environment in which interaction could occur as part of university life. At Torrens University Australia, campuses across the country’s capital cities are being scoped as industry and engagement hubs, applying the same principle in a different institutional setting.

Co-location is an enabling condition rather than an end in itself. Its value comes from the relationships, shared work, and new combinations of knowledge that become possible when external partners participate in the environment. It can also influence internal culture by making collaboration visible and routine.

This outward connection keeps entrepreneurial activity tied to value beyond the institution. The university’s operating model becomes more responsive because partners are involved in defining needs, developing approaches, and delivering outcomes. External engagement therefore contributes directly to how the organisation learns and changes.

Leadership must be coordinated, adaptive, and patient

Institution-wide transformation cannot depend on one senior figure. Aleks argues that the broader leadership team needs to share the same direction, strategic intent, and cultural approach, then lead consistently through its different parts of the university. He describes this coordination as flying in formation.

The leadership team needs to fly in formation because that’s the only way you can achieve that scale of movement.

Consistency across the team enables distributed leadership rather than constraining it. People receive a coherent signal about the institution’s purpose while retaining responsibility for leading within their areas. This is how change can reach sufficient scale to become part of everyday practice.

The individual leader must also adapt. Reflecting on his work across Swinburne University of Technology, RMIT University, Aston University, and Torrens University Australia, Aleks identifies multimodal leadership as an important lesson. Different staff, circumstances, opportunities, and problems require different responses. A fixed personal style cannot meet every context, so leaders need to develop a broader portfolio of approaches over time.

Patience is part of that adaptability. Urgency can be valuable during transformation, but progress also depends on allowing people, ideas, and institutional practices time to mature. Continuous improvement offers a more constructive rhythm than waiting for long periods and then presenting change as a sudden disruption.

For Professor Aleks Subic, entrepreneurial leadership ultimately means creating a university that improves through the daily contributions of its whole community. When clarity, authority, recognition, partnership, and adaptive leadership reinforce one another, innovation moves beyond rhetoric and becomes an institutional capability.

Ready for more?

Building an entrepreneurial university is not about creating a single innovation centre or launching a new initiative. It requires aligning purpose, culture, incentives, leadership, and partnerships so that innovation becomes part of how the institution operates every day.

• Building the entrepreneurial university: Leadership lessons from Aalto’s founding president examines how visionary leadership, institutional purpose, and long-term commitment can help universities create cultures that support entrepreneurship and innovation. Like Aleks Subic’s perspective, it highlights the importance of shaping the conditions that allow people and ideas to thrive.
• What if we designed the university from scratch? Lessons from Minerva examines how universities can align their structures, learning experiences, and organisational choices with the capabilities they want graduates to develop. Like Aleks Subic’s perspective, it argues that meaningful change happens when purpose is translated into systems, practices, and everyday experiences.

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