This is the story of how Aalto Ventures Program grew from a potluck party to the education unit it is now.

Founded by students and the university together

In 2012, students and faculty across Aalto University founded Aalto Ventures Program. The program was initiated by students, most visibly Linda Liukas and Kristo Ovaska, who were also part of the founding team of Aalto Entrepreneurship Society, nowadays known as Aaltoes.

From the university side, AVP started as a kind of a potluck party of educators providing the for-credit education and a small team working on everything else. Markku Maula was the founding director who brought Juhana Nurmio, then a student, and me on board as the co-founders of AVP. For everyday work, Juhana and I were quickly joined by another student, Mikko Hagelberg. When AVP started to grow and demand more bandwidth, Olli Vuola was hired as executive director of AVP.

Small streams make large rivers

The emergence of AVP is an example of how small streams make large rivers. In the case of AVP, the most important streams were the student activists and the educators, both supported by the university, especially the top management and now-defunct Aalto Center for Entrepreneurship ACE.

Kalle Airo (right) has been with AVP since its founding in 2012.

There had always — at least since the 1980s that is — been student clubs focusing on entrepreneurship in Otaniemi, but they only had a handful of active members yearly. The same can be said about research and entrepreneurship education, which had some great individuals and small teams working for decades but with a relatively small number of students participating in the education.

From drill sergeants to softer values and higher impact

We co-developed the early versions of AVP with Stanford Technology Ventures Program. Therefore, the roots of the first AVP courses came from both the beforementioned potluck party of educators and from Silicon Valley.

In the beginning, the education portfolio was a loose collection of courses with shared direction but also overlapping content.

We started with the mission to provide Aalto students with the inspiration, capability, and network necessary to build new scalable businesses. This naïve mission worked well for the first years. It lured in students who were already interested in entrepreneurship and startups, who resembled the students of STVP and therefore responded well to ‘pressure cooker’ courses such as Venture Formation and Lean Launchpad. These courses worked well with high-preforming, motivated teams who really wanted to start a startup with their existing team.

In the beginning, the education portfolio was a loose collection of courses with shared direction but also overlapping content.

Combining bright and motivated students with elective courses in entrepreneurship led to great learning and successful companies. But from another point of view, it is also preaching to the choir of people who already want to learn what we are delivering.

Two kinds of students, two kinds of solutions

During the years, we understood that all university graduates benefit from, and even need, entrepreneurial capabilities. It also turned out that the whole society would benefit from everyone having these capabilities. However, many students do not want to learn entrepreneurship.

For basically any topic you can teach, there are two opposite groups of students: the believers, who have the intrinsic motivation, and the non-believers, who do not have the inherent motivation, at least not yet.

If the students who needed the capabilities but didn’t want them wouldn’t come to us, we would go to them.

This led us to the innovation of integrated entrepreneurship education. If the students who needed the capabilities but didn’t want them wouldn’t come to us, we would go to them. But we didn’t want anyone to feel like they were forced to learn something they didn’t want, so we didn’t talk about entrepreneurship. Instead, we helped the students, for example, to be more customer-centric, think more creatively, and present their ideas more clearly — skills every entrepreneur needs.

By collaborating with different programs, minors, and individual teachers from all Schools of Aalto University, we brought this kind of entrepreneurial content to numerous courses at all levels of education. By doing this, we’ve reached hundreds of students who never would’ve taken an AVP course. We believe — no, we know — that they’re now better equipped for both entrepreneurship and working life.

Evangelists of entrepreneurship

We knew we were onto something, so we didn’t want to keep it to ourselves. In the coming years, AVP took a leading role in two national education projects funded by the Ministry of Education and Culture: YTYÄ and YYTO. While the means were different, the core idea in both projects was the same — to facilitate and encourage the learning of entrepreneurial skills outside traditional entrepreneurship education. During the projects, many universities and universities of applied sciences around Finland started to integrate entrepreneurial content into their teaching. They gave more space for students to explore entrepreneurial capabilities outside the classroom.

At Aalto University, ‘entrepreneurial mindset’ was selected as one of the three cross-cutting approaches, the other two being ‘solutions for sustainability’ and ‘radical creativity.’ Aalto now officially recognized something AVP had thought for some time: that all students benefit from an entrepreneurial mindset. Naturally, AVP took the lead in developing that entrepreneurial mindset. Still, despite our constantly growing team, we didn’t have the resources to teach the whole university and focus on our own courses. This was alleviated by the founding of the Aalto Co-Educator (ACE) team, to which AVP lent a couple of its teachers. As the new team was now in charge of integrating all three cross-cutting themes into existing education, we at AVP had more time to focus on our own courses — and the future.

Aalto now officially recognized something AVP had thought for some time: that all students benefit from an entrepreneurial mindset.

Changes in the inside

Around the same time, AVP faced two significant changes: COVID-19 and Lauri Järvilehto. While the latter was far more welcome, both forced us to re-think who we were and how we do things.

Lauri was hired as a co-director and Professor of Practice, and his role was to figure out what kind of entrepreneurship education unit AVP would be. It was Lauri who introduced us to the Sustainable Development Goals and wanted us not just to teach but make an impact. His vision, which later spread to the whole Aalto University, was that if we teach all students to build like an entrepreneur, they can build a better, sustainable future.

COVID-19 forced every organization to develop new solutions and practices at an unprecedented pace, and AVP is no exception. We started to focus on well-being before, but the pandemic really shifted the gears. With new practices, more freedom at the workplace, and new pedagogical approaches, we wanted to ensure our employees’ and students’ well-being always came first.

AVP’s visual identity has evolved over the years.

Looking back, going forward

We’ve changed a lot in ten years. Our organization has grown by more than double and actually become organized. We’ve changed our mission statement, tone of voice, and visual identity more than once. We’ve changed — or maybe found — our focus. Many people fear change, but when you look back, you often realize that it was for the better. We know we’ll change in the next ten years too. And we welcome that change with open arms.