Leading entrepreneurial change in higher education: Lessons from the H-FARM ecosystem

How can universities make entrepreneurial learning part of their daily practice?

Antonella Sannella, Managing Director of H-FARM College, shares how industry projects, protected experimentation, a connected campus, and thoughtful use of AI help students apply knowledge and build judgement.

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Summary

Universities ask students to adapt, build new capabilities, and prepare for work that is changing quickly. Antonella Sannella, Managing Director of H-FARM College, argues that institutions must accept the same challenge. H-FARM began as a venture builder in 2005 and added education to its ecosystem in 2016, creating a setting where students learn alongside start-ups, technology companies, and other parts of the innovation community.

Its model rests on a demanding form of institutional consistency. A university that teaches experimentation must give students and educators room to test ideas. One that values agility must review its own programmes and processes. As generative AI changes the relationship between an assignment and the learning behind it, that willingness to adapt becomes part of educational credibility. Antonella’s experience shows how entrepreneurial leadership can connect institutional purpose with the daily design of learning.

Leadership begins with institutional behaviour

Antonella’s background in classics, archaeology, marketing, and digital transformation shaped her approach to higher education. Studying culture and context taught her to examine issues from different perspectives, while nearly 30 years of work with brands showed her how quickly an operating environment can change. At H-FARM, those lessons converge in a leadership practice based on reading reality continuously.

Leadership starts with the ability to read reality continuously.

The questions she brought from marketing remain relevant: who is the institution creating value for, what is changing around it, and what makes its contribution distinctive? Answers have consequences for programmes, teaching methods, roles, and internal processes. H-FARM reviews and evolves its programmes each year to reflect emerging technologies and changes in the market, supported by a structure that allows decisions to move quickly.

Change also depends on bringing people with the institution. Antonella sees transformation as an opportunity for colleagues to develop new capabilities, take on different roles, and encounter perspectives they had not previously considered. This requires more than communicating urgency. Leaders must create conditions in which people can participate in change and see a credible path for their own professional growth.

The university has to live by what it teaches.

That principle establishes a reciprocal expectation. If students are asked to leave familiar territory, the institution must be prepared to reconsider its own routines. Leadership becomes visible through behaviour, with the university serving as an example of the adaptability it wants graduates to develop.

Real work closes the gap between knowing and doing

H-FARM College’s mission is to develop globally minded talent able to transform innovation into human progress. Antonella identifies the distance between knowing and doing as one of the structural gaps that can prevent higher education from achieving that aim. In a conventional sequence, students study, graduate, and only then encounter the realities of work. H-FARM gives them repeated exposure to those realities throughout their education.

Companies therefore form a structural part of the educational model. They bring live challenges into programmes and meet students through projects, talks, and informal formats such as Lunch Connect and Breakfast Connect. These interactions help students understand how organisations work, what professional expectations feel like, and why particular areas of knowledge matter.

Students learn by applying, and they apply in order to learn more deeply.

The relationship benefits companies as well. They meet students who have practised contributing in real settings and gain access to younger perspectives on technology, products, and behaviour. H-FARM draws on a network of more than 600 organisations, spanning technology companies, Italian brands, and start-ups. This variety also helps students understand where they might work and what kind of professional they want to become.

Antonella points to employment as one measure of the model. She reports that 92% of graduates find work within six months, while 60% are confirmed during their internships. Some students also establish start-ups of their own, continuing the entrepreneurial activity from which the wider H-FARM ecosystem developed.

Experimentation works when the stakes are real

Entrepreneurial education needs space for failure, feedback, and revision. Antonella describes the university as a protected environment for genuine experimentation. Students can make mistakes and try again, while the problems, deadlines, and expectations set by companies remain real. Professors and tutors guide the process without removing its practical consequences.

This combination helps explain why freedom can produce discipline. Responsibility grows from the student’s motivation to complete a task, create something useful, and take ownership of the result. When an approach fails, the learner must examine what happened, make an adjustment, and test the next version.

Experimentation, when it’s real, creates self-discipline.

H-FARM’s start-up origins give this practice a clear logic. Founders need a stable sense of purpose and the flexibility to change a solution when the context shifts. Students are encouraged to protect the purpose of their work while challenging the model used to achieve it. The aim is to develop judgement alongside confidence: an understanding that ideas can be shaped into something that did not previously exist.

The same invitation extends to educators. H-FARM attracts professionals with extensive market experience and academics who want to test approaches that may be difficult to pursue elsewhere. Several professors and programme directors have founded start-ups themselves. Their experience helps connect academic depth with the practical work of developing, questioning, and implementing ideas.

The campus turns an ecosystem into a learning environment

H-FARM’s physical setting supports this educational model. The campus near Venice brings together schools, H-FARM College, a business school, start-ups, technology companies, and innovation activity. Learning, work, and venture creation occur in the same place, allowing students to encounter ideas and organisations beyond the formal curriculum.

Its location away from a conventional urban innovation hub was deliberate. Classrooms face green spaces, sport forms part of daily life, and the surrounding environment gives students room to focus and connect. Antonella links physical wellbeing, energy, and balance with the conditions needed for sustained learning.

The design also encourages the encounters through which teams form. Students may arrive at the start-up centre with an individual idea and be asked to return with collaborators. Informal conversations and time spent together allow people to exchange perspectives, question assumptions, and build work collectively.

Innovation rarely happens in isolation.

Co-location cannot create collaboration on its own, yet it changes the opportunities available. A student can move between study, company contact, experimentation, and community without treating each as a separate experience. The campus makes the ecosystem accessible as part of everyday education.

AI makes learning design a leadership question

Generative AI strengthens the case for this active model. A student can now produce an essay, report, analysis, or formally correct answer within seconds. That output may reveal little about the reasoning process used to create it.

The product of learning is no longer always proof that learning has happened.

Antonella believes universities must place greater emphasis on application, questioning, decision-making, and creation. At H-FARM College, AI is integrated across programmes as an intellectual framework that extends beyond technical courses. In AI transformation labs, students work on organisational challenges, assess assumptions, weigh options with incomplete information, and develop AI-enabled solutions and prototypes.

A project with Ferrero asked students to explain where AI added value during the redesign of a product pack and where it did not. The exercise required them to evaluate the tool’s contribution instead of treating its use as the objective. This reflects H-FARM’s wider aim of helping students think with AI while retaining their judgement.

The institution is also examining its own practice. An internal assessment identified academic processes where AI could add value and established priorities for implementation. H-FARM plans to offer students an AI tutor as an additional source of personalised learning support, alongside its professors and human tutors.

Ethical judgement remains part of the design. Students consider whether an application should be pursued, whom it serves, and what consequences may follow. Some stages of learning are deliberately protected so that students must think independently, struggle with a problem, develop an argument, and accept responsibility for their reasoning.

Entrepreneurial leadership in higher education therefore reaches beyond adding projects or technology to an existing model. It asks the institution to keep learning, expose its choices to evidence, and support people through change. Antonella Sannella’s experience at H-FARM College suggests that a university earns credibility when its own actions embody the curiosity, courage, and adaptability it seeks to develop in students.

Ready for more?

Developing entrepreneurial graduates requires more than teaching business creation. It means creating learning environments where students can take ownership, experiment with ideas, work on meaningful challenges, and develop the confidence to act in uncertain situations.

• How to build the university that didn’t exist: Lessons from CODE University explores how CODE University designs student agency into the learning experience through project-based learning, personal mission development, co-creation, and qualitative feedback. The episode argues that entrepreneurial capabilities emerge when students repeatedly practise making decisions, taking responsibility, and creating something that did not exist before.
• Building a generation of changemakers: The UCE Model examines how the University of Canterbury is developing entrepreneurial mindsets through experiential learning, confidence-building, community, and values-driven education. The conversation highlights the importance of helping students see themselves as changemakers, regardless of whether they start a business, pursue research, or follow another professional path.

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