One of my all-time favorite things about our annual summer holiday to France as a “Brit” (apart from experiencing some real sunshine!) is the possibility of popping to the nearest superstore – or hypermarché (pronounced with my very best A-Level accent). These retail wonders have everything, all under one roof. None of the usual grumblings uttered after a UK shopping trip: “Ugh, we’ll have to go somewhere else for vanilla paste” or “I was sure they’d sell star anise”. No, these French treasure troves boast the complete shopping list. So, why am I putting the hype in hypermarché, you’re probably wondering?! Well, when I’m not obsessing over the soft cheese section, these places remind me why I chose to work in a University, over say a VC (venture capital firm), corporate lab, or start-up. Simply put: Universities contain all the ingredients for entrepreneurship ecosystems to flourish. From the incredible talent pool to the risk-taking innovators to the research and thought leaders to the facilities, building out a support infrastructure in this environment is a truly exciting process and one that has kept me constantly motivated in my job. Most crucially though, in the almost thirteen years that I’ve worked at The London School of Economics (LSE) the one thing that has struck me is that collaboration, the mixing of all these ingredients, is the only way innovation can really thrive in the long term. Especially, my experience during the transformative journey of LSE Generate. So, grab your trolley, and let’s allez down the aisles to see what every university, and indeed other entrepreneurial ecosystems, should be saving on their shopping list.
5kg STEM
5kg Social Sciences
For Universities to create serious businesses that deliver long-term results on the UN SDGs, we need to move beyond the default association of innovation with STEM-focussed setups. If Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) are to continue creating waves with their spin-outs, empower future innovators, and produce applicable and ground-breaking research, we need everyone around the table. However techy an idea, you will always more than often identify a social element at the center of that innovation; whether that be in the adoption, or in the behavior it drives, or even around the rollout solution in the form of regulation -. Some recent examples of tech-enabled innovations that have a strong social sciences core that we have seen here at the entrepreneurship hub here at LSE might include: Bloom Money, The Lowdown, and Kinhub. To overlook this point and operate within a silo is not just short-sighted, it is simply not sustainable. Building programs that allow for the cross-pollination of departmental skillsets, collaborate with other universities, get institutional buy-in, and go the extra mile to spotlight the often-overlooked creatives and “fuzzies” to role model these areas for future entrepreneurs is the only way that we can create the most exciting pool of entrepreneurial solutions to the big problems we face today (Scott Hartley’s book The Fuzzy and the Techie explores this marriage of the two thematic sides really well).
1 x united front (organic)
It can’t be just the entrepreneurship hubs that scream innovation; the whole university needs to be engaging in entrepreneurial activity at every opportunity. Institutional commitment drives how universities make a public and strategic pledge to entrepreneurship. From innovative talent recruitment platforms to leveraging the capacity of digital learning, to the incentivization of entrepreneurial upskilling opportunities for staff, through to consistent engagement with industry, universities will only remain competitive when they are living and breathing entrepreneurship, day in, day out - not only through technological advances but also via a deep nurturing of the enterprising mindset. We need to see institutions making a public and strategic commitment to entrepreneurship and engagement by adopting powerful and relevant visions, missions, and strategic plans. Easier said than done, of course, but if the pandemic has taught us anything, it is that even age-old institutions that require radical restructuring can adapt under pressure to adopt a more agile, flexible approach to survive. Therefore, at LSE Generate, we have recently opened up our offerings to professional services staff so that any employee can benefit from the process of building a business, transferring those learnings to their own area of work, and building up those essential skills such as resilience and facing failure along the way. We’re also in talks to introduce a new staff policy that allows employees to spend up to 5 days a year developing a side hustle or honing intrapreneurial skills through a tailored boot camp. This example shows us how, universities can demonstrate their entrepreneurship and engaged spirit by embracing visions, missions, and strategic plans that resonate with their context and diverse communities.
4kg Executive Education students
10kg Alumni
Times are certainly changing and universities are increasingly evolving into places that promote life-long education. At LSE Generate, harnessing the life experience of executive education candidates, for example, has organically grown our mentor pool, expanded our list of delivery partners, brought in sponsorship to further support entrepreneurs, and created powerful role models for our incoming and younger students. Similarly, nurturing students through tailored programming while they are here on campus encourages them to then return as alumni and support, sharing their tangible experiences of building businesses and with relatable examples of having applied their course learning. For small teams like ours, it i’s this virtuous circle that enables us to scale and support more students year-on-year. This year we are inviting graduates to participate in a pledge whereby a percentage of a founder’s eventual profits are poured back into the programme, while also unlocking a new peer innovator community across the globe. This is an example of how the university builds a comprehensive support system for entrepreneurship through service alignment with alumni as a main stakeholder group.
A selection of the best artisan products from the international aisle
While on the topic of global reach, it is worth touching on the sometimes-untapped potential of internationalization as a wonderful catalyst for impact and innovation within universities. With students entering higher education from every corner of the world, the outreach potential to entrepreneurs, investors, service providers and business enablers is vast. More crucially though, this network allows students, through the power of proximity and experiential learning, to learn directly from those experiencing social issues from homelessness to climate change to lack of adequate healthcare and, together, create powerful and impactful solutions for the betterment of society. This real-world approach to entrepreneurial education is now shifting from the extra-curricular arena to become an integrated part of a course and is often the most memorable part of the degree itself. The university works towards providing a variety of opportunities for students to improve their entrepreneurial knowledge.
10g problems
90g solutions
Last, but absolutely not least, is the diversity debate. It is nearly impossible to attend an innovation summit these days without spotting an EDI (Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion) topic in the agenda, giving the audience a clear action as they leave. The Conduit London’s proactive approach of focusing 10% on the problem and 90% on the solution, an action-oriented approach, is one that we have borrowed at LSE Generate after observing how our diversity-related events could become stuck in a doom-and-gloom rut with sessions often turning into frustrated rants rather than providing much in the way of actionable strategies. Last year, we created our community clusters: peer groups of underrepresented founders that support, encourage, and explore shared experiences that empower them to progress in their chosen paths. This isn’t about creating token events subtly (or not so!) designed to improve an organization’s optics; it’s about analyzing, in-depth, the current demographics of your unique audience, researching the gaps and opportunities, and creating a tailored roll-out strategy around them. As an example, through our internal surveying, we discovered that 34% of our entrepreneurs identify as neurodivergent, and through liaising with experts in this field, we have now curated a first-of-its-kind program that harnesses the unique strengths of this group and equips them to excel so that, as with the proper championing of any underrepresented group, everyone’s a winner. In this way, the university generates a wide range of benefits through entrepreneurship and is working towards greater economic impacts in the region.
As we all aspire to become impact-driven organizations, why not make it today’s mission to sack off these silos and start to pilot innovative ways to ensure that everyone is included, no longer viewed as a competitor but rather a collaborator. This approach is no longer a nice-to-have or a nifty CSR tick-in-the-box; given the urgency of these global issues and the opportunity to unleash the untapped potential of universities within their regional and global ecosystems, in our and most importantly our students’ eyes, it’s a straight-up non-negotiable. The ingredients are there so let’s hit the shops together; bon appetit!
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LSE Generate