Turn your university into a science/innovation powerhouse!

If you work inside a university — or care deeply about what modern universities can become — you already feel the tension. The 21C world is moving faster than most traditional institutions are designed to handle. Industry partners want deeper collaboration. Students want experiential learning: to build things, not just passively study them. Researchers are sitting on discoveries with enormous potential, waiting for a pathway to the world. And yet the structures, cultures, and incentives of higher education were not built with any of this in mind.

I built this seminar/school because I believe universities are one of the most under-leveraged institutions on the planet — and because I have seen what happens when that changes. When a university gets serious about innovation, it does not just produce more startups or file more patents. It becomes a different kind of place: more energised, more relevant, more magnetic to the talent and partners it needs in the 21C. That transformation is learnable, repeatable, and strategic. It does not require a billion-dollar endowment. It requires clarity, commitment, and the right architecture.

What I want to give you in this seminar is exactly that architecture. We are going to work through both dimensions of university innovation — the internal one (building an intrapreneurial culture where faculty and staff are genuine innovators, not just teachers and administrators) and the external one (constructing the entrepreneurship ecosystem that connects your institution to mentors, investors, industry, and the global market). These two dimensions are not competing priorities. They are the dual engine. Get both running, and the institution becomes genuinely innovative, attractive, and unstoppable in the 21C.

I want to be honest with you about something: the frameworks we cover — design thinking, lean startup, open innovation, systems thinking — are not entirely new in theory. What is hard is applying them inside the specific, friction-filled reality of academic governance, tenure culture, and departmental politics. That is where most university innovation efforts stall. So a significant part of this school is about exactly that: diagnosing what is holding your institution back, building the stakeholder buy-in to move forward, and designing programmes and policies that survive beyond the next strategic plan.

By the time you complete this curriculum, you will be able to assess your university's innovation maturity, build a credible roadmap for transformation, design and run both intrapreneurship programmes and entrepreneurship ecosystems, navigate tech transfer and spin-off strategy, and measure and communicate your impact in ways that sustain the mission long-term. That is not a small set of skills! It is the full toolkit for becoming the kind of leader who genuinely changes what a university can do.

I am glad you are here. The work is real, the stakes are very high, and the opportunity is extraordinary. Let's build something that lasts!