Thinking like an entrepreneur
Entrepreneurial and non-entrepreneurial mindsets can be told apart through the simple gauge of how you relate to the problems you face.
Our strategy
Entrepreneurial mindset
One of the Aalto community’s strengths is its courageous, low-hierarchy culture with empowered students. Building on this, Aalto fosters a thriving entrepreneurial culture. This thrive is visible in the success stories such as Slush and Junction sprouting from the heart of Aalto’s innovation and entrepreneurial ecosystem.
You don’t need to be an entrepreneur to have entrepreneurial capabilities. Everyone needs them.
Learning how to think, build, create, and research like an entrepreneur should be a right of everyone in the university community. The goal is to advance entrepreneurial capabilities throughout Aalto by supporting student-driven activities and initiatives while ensuring that entrepreneurial studies, co-created by students and faculty members, are available to the community as a whole.
Entrepreneurial capabilities – courage and curiosity to find new ways to create value, taking ownership of your work, having intrinsic motivation, owning up to your mistakes and tenaciously getting back up again – can and should be applied to anything one does.
Below, people from all over the Aalto community share their thoughts on the many ways fostering an entrepreneurial mindset can help us all on our respective career journeys – whatever they might be.
The other cross-cutting approaches are
Aalto University is home to a vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystem and culture. The entrepreneurial mindset is about the ability and willingness to continuously search for opportunities to create sustainable social and economic value and the courage to take action to pursue these opportunities under uncertainty.
We foster and cherish this mindset here at Aalto University dearly. Having an entrepreneurial mindset doesn’t mean one embarks on a journey to become an entrepreneur; it means applying this mindset to whatever it is you strive towards with unmatched passion.
Jouko Lampinen, Dean, School of Science
Thoughts from Aalto community
Aalto community members share their thoughts on how fostering an entrepreneurial mindset helps them create something new.
Building like an entrepreneur
For Pasi Herranen, an entrepreneurial mindset means having wild visions, mental readiness, and continuously developing one's social skills.
Entrepreneurial mindset and research
An entrepreneurial mindset means identifying problems and needs through precise observations of daily life.
Entrepreneurial design
Patricia Pinheiro was already a successful entrepreneur when she first came to the Industrial and Strategic design program as a MA student.
Tools for creating an entrepreneurial mindset
The world is changing faster than ever, and no one knows what happens tomorrow, let alone in ten years.
Aalto University coordinated INCREDIT project has been selected in the EIT HEI Initiative
EIT HEI Initiative to unlock innovation potential in Europe's Higher Education.
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