Startup at Nordic Universities
This project was cofinanced by Nordic Innovation.
This pre-project aimed to bring together university-led startup hubs in the Nordics to explore opportunities for improving student startup services individually and collectively.
More specifically the project aimed to:
- Develop a platform for organisational learning and development of university-based student-startups and innovation.
- Enable universities for whom student-startups and innovation is a rather new area of activity to fast-track implementation of best practices by learning from other Nordic universities.
- Scope a longer-term partnership and cooperation project that will enable Nordic Universities to develop complementary specialised startup and innovation ecosystems open to students from other Nordic countries.
Background
The project was led by UCPH Lighthouse in cooperation with Helsinki Incubators (University of Helsinki) and Lyspæren (University of Stavanger) and with participation of +10 other universities in the Nordic countries.
The project was implemented during 2024.
Lessons learned
Nordic governments and Nordic universities share the urgency that universities could – and should – impact more directly on society though innovation and entrepreneurship.
As a response, Nordic universities increasingly emphasise on innovation and entrepreneurship in education – meaning in academic education as well as in more practice-based courses and programmes aiming to inspire and capacitate students to pursue business ventures.
The efforts are paying off: More and more students emerge with ideas and early versions of business ventures that they would like to explore and pursue commercially. This offers a great opportunity for Nordic universities to very directly contribute to business development, job creation and sustainable development in Nordic societies.
To further support the many talented and driven students on the journey from early idea to pursuing commercially (a version of) the idea, many Nordic universities offer special purpose vehicles in a form of startup hubs / innovation centres / incubators / pre-accelerators.
From this pre-project we learned that these student startup hubs come in many shapes and forms, largely as results of the university specific unique circumstances from which they originated – and the societies and regional ecosystems surrounding each university. Sustainability, circularity/green transition, health- and data sciences are among the shared focus areas for university startup hubs in the Nordics.
While the Nordic university-led student startup hubs share several fundamental opportunities, they also share many challenges and bottlenecks. The pre-project showed that Nordic university-led startup hubs could benefit from working together on a deeper, more structured level, rather than as in the past though several loosely connected cooperation projects (most of which are in the research space).