Making European Universities More Entrepreneurial
Most European universities are not (yet) producing significant volumes of entrepreneurial outputs. However, Europe is increasingly in need of innovation and jobs creation. To tackle this problem, I co-created an EU Knowledge Alliance and a master's program aimed at spurring entrepreneurship and innovation in European universities through experiential learning, Silicon Valley's best practices and the engagement of local ecosystems. The master's program featured tracks in sustainability, social impact, and technology entrepreneurship.
My collaborators and I built a European network of universities, companies and foundations from nine EU member states, and Stanford as an extra-EU partner. Together, we designed and piloted Europe's first experiential Master's program in Entrepreneurship whose students' core deliverable is creating a social or technology venture. We also built digital tools supporting the program's participants throughout their venture creation and learning process.
My main contributions were: creating the partnership between Stanford, the European Commission (which funds the Alliance), and the University of Milan Bicocca (which leads the network); embedding design thinking and Silicon Valley innovation practices at the core of SMARTUP; leading the Stanford design thinking and entrepreneurship program for the SMARTUP European faculty and executives; facilitating the program's design and including the track on sustainability; leading the Stanford working packages; and lecturing and mentoring the first cohort of graduate students in Europe.
