Aalto’s Blueprint For Building Founders, Startups & Centaurs – The Finnish Way

Aalto University’s Design Factory was positively buzzing. Like actually buzzing. Teams of student inventors sawed, molded, pressed, and tinkered to get their prototypes showroom ready for the 30th PdP Gala, then just days away.

At the gala, they’d show off their inventions to investors and industry insiders. Master’s students from engineering, design, and business had spent the last nine months designing a solution, testing the market, making a business plan, and building their prototype as part of Aalto’s pioneering course, Product Development Project (PdP). On that particular Monday, it was crunch time.

“Having access to DF, to the Design Factory, has been kind of the heartbeat to our exploration,” says Coleman Piburn, a first-year master’s student in Aalto’s Collaborative Industrial Design program.

“We’ve been working late in the evening, making different rooms smell like seaweed. Without DF, we’d be in a much less advanced position than we are.”

Piburn and his teammates are turning seaweed residue into everyday products like sunglasses and lampshades, reducing the need for plastic. The vision for their company, Sealevä, is to create “a regenerative material economy where every product can be made, used, and returned to nature without leaving a trace — powered by the ocean’s most abundant resource.”

Sealevä collaborated with PdP and Design Factory to buy a 3D pellet printer to help turn seaweed into material sthat can be used in a variety of manufacturing processes.

“You have everything you need right here, to build anything from seaweed sheets like this to a rocket ship,” says Mohamed Elamir, Sealevä co-founder and 2022 graduate of Aalto’s master in Advanced Materials for Innovation and Sustainability.

Think of this factory, and the upcoming gala where teams of students will show off what they’ve built, as Aalto University’s entrepreneurship ecosystem in miniature. Multidisciplinary, hands-on, fueled by impact, and intent on getting ideas out into the world.

AALTO BUSINESS’ ENTERPRENEURIAL DNA

Aalto University School of Business sits inside a university designed for cross-pollination. Founded in 2010, Aalto University brought together three of Finland’s highest-ranked institutions: Helsinki School of Economics, Helsinki University of Technology and the University of Art and Design Helsinki. Its working title was “Innovation University.”

“There was a very specific goal of creating something new in the university sector to promote innovation,” says Dean Timo Korkeamäki. “The combination is actually quite unique in Europe: tech, design, creativity and business to generate value for society.

“That multidisciplinarity is the whole raison d’être of our young university, and I love the opportunities that it opens.”

It was also a statement about Finland’s economy, which at the time leaned heavily on large corporations. Aalto’s formation came in the shadow of both the global financial crisis and the decline of Nokia, the Finnish telecom giant once famous for mobile phones that seemed nearly indestructible – until the iPhone came along.

The result is an entrepreneurship model filtered through Finnish values of low hierarchy, collective responsibility, public investment, and a cultural preference for doing over talking. Its impact is increasingly visible in both outside rankings and the companies emerging from it.

In Redstone’s 2025 University Startup Index, Aalto ranked 12th among 905 European universities for its efficiency in producing startups within the mid-sized university category. Invest Europe’s The VC Factor report placed Aalto eighth among European alma maters of venture capital-backed founders and CEOs.

Aalto’s ecosystem has produced four unicorns to date, including IQM, a quantum computing company founded by Aalto researchers through Aalto Innovation Services; ICEYE, a satellite-imagery company launched by Aalto students; and RELEX Solutions, a supply-chain platform founded by researchers in industrial engineering and management. Wolt, a food-delivery app created by Aalto students within the student-run startup ecosystem, later exited for $7 billion.

Altogether, Aalto-linked startups are valued at more than €30 billion, generate over €5 billion in annual revenue and have created more than 15,000 jobs.

WHERE TOP-DOWN MEETS BOTTOM-UP

Think of Aalto’s entrepreneurial ecosystem as two overlapping systems.

One is top-down through university-backed education, research commercialization, and structured programs. This includes bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral courses in entrepreneurship; the master’s in Sustainable Entrepreneurship; and its Ideas to Impact research pipeline.

The other is bottom-up and student led, with initiatives like Aalto Entrepreneurship Society, Startup Sauna, and Slush – a startup and tech conference that attracts the largest concentration of VCs in the world. This June, Aalto hosted the INNOVA Europe Grand Finale, a sustainable startup competition for student founders at 11 leading European business schools.

The entrepreneurship unit, housed inside the business school, acts as a bridge between the two.

“Entrepreneurship is not only becoming the next founder who develops a unicorn. It’s really about taking initiative, creating things, even if this is very localized through smaller businesses. That’s what Finland really needs for a stable economy and economic growth,” says Ewald Kibler, associate professor of entrepreneurship and head of the unit.

Kibler joined Aalto in 2014 as its first assistant professor in entrepreneurship. At the time, the unit had two faculty members and about eight or nine people total. Today, it has about 30 people, including five professors and two permanent lecturers.

Part of the unit’s work is to support students who want to build high-growth companies. But Kibler is careful not to define entrepreneurship only that way.

“We need more successful startups in Finland, but we also need a much more inclusive way of supporting our students who are interested in doing great things,” Kibler says.

“You can do many different things when you’re interested in entrepreneurship. You can be an art entrepreneur, social entrepreneur, interested in policymaking or working for public institutions.”

IN SEARCH OF 100 FINNISH CENTAURS

Even as other startup communities chase the elusive unicorn, Finland is hunting centaurs – companies with at least €100 million in annual recurring revenue. The country’s 100×100 goal aims to produce 100 companies earning €100 million by the year 2050. (Finland has 20 centaurs to date.)

Aalto’s Founder School was created specifically to help reach this goal.

“One of our North Stars is to ask, ‘Does this decision help us train Aalto students into founders who could set up companies that reach 100 million in yearly revenue?’” says Kasper Suomalainen, Founder School manager, an Aalto alum, and an entrepreneur himself.

It hosts Founder Talks, monthly fireside chats between students and entrepreneurs, streamed with Yle, Finland’s public broadcaster. Guests have included founders of some of Finland’s current Centaurs including Wolt, Supercell, and St1.

It’s also home to the Founder Minor, open to students from any Aalto school. Courses are designed around practical founder skills like go-to-market, product development, storytelling, sales, and pitching investors.

It recently began awarding prototyping and validation grants, offering roughly €500 to €5,000 to help students test early ideas. Some ideas die not because they are bad, but because students do not have a small amount of money, a place to work, access to a lab or a tool license, says Apurva Ganoo, lecturer in entrepreneurship. Sometimes, all they need is €50.

Founder School’s signature offering is Founder Sprint, a three-month program for students with ambition but no obvious outlet. Applicants do not need a team, a co-founder, or even an idea. Instead, they are looking for talented applicants who can be trained in entrepreneurial thinking.

Students study trends, identify problems, test them with customers, build prototypes, and develop business models around what they create. For now, the program focuses on software because it offers the fastest way to teach the process. The goal is not necessarily for every student to leave with a company, but for them to leave knowing how to start one.

Milla-Maaria Virokannas, a marketing student at Aalto Business, applied hoping to learn how to scale the gym she co-owns. Her team developed a fitness app and onboarding tool designed to help gyms reduce customer churn, one of the industry’s most costly problems.

The idea drew early praise, but the feedback grew tougher as the sprint progressed. The biggest weakness was the venture’s unique selling point — either the team had not found it yet, or had not learned how to communicate it, Virokannas says.

She believes programs like Founder Sprint – and the ecosystem around it – is helping make entrepreneurship feel less distant to younger students. Founder stories, courses and university-backed programs give them earlier exposure to what starting a company looks like.

“It doesn’t feel like it’s that kind of far off anymore for young people,” she said.

POWERED BY STUDENTS: SLUSH, AALTOES AND TALKOOT

Every November, during one of Finland’s darkest and slushiest months, thousands of founders, investors, and startup insiders descend on Helsinki for Slush, a global matchmaking hub for early-stage startups and the venture capitalists looking to fund them. Chartered planes from Silicon Valley and other global tech hubs deliver attendees to Slush Week pitch competitions, networking sessions, and other side events.

The whole thing grew out of the student-driven startup scene around Aalto, and its leadership remains strikingly young. Korkeamäki says the CEO is typically around 25, often a recent master’s graduate, and serves a two-year stint.

“It still has a lot of this youthful, raw spirit.”

While Slush may be the ecosystem’s most visible student creation, it is far from the only one.

Students founded the Aalto Entrepreneurship Society, known as Aaltoes, to inspire global, high-growth entrepreneurship. It is among the largest university entrepreneurship communities in Europe. Aaltoes and its offshoots have helped launch or support a range of ecosystem initiatives, including Junction, one of Europe’s largest hackathons.

There’s also Aalto AI focusing on accelerating Finnish artificial intelligence and its applications. Sidequest to help students turn side projects into ventures within six weeks. Strive to connect Aalto talent with startups who need them, along with several others. All are supported by Aalto business’ network, ecosystem, and resources.

Suomalainen, who was president of Aaltoes as a student, says the university’s willingness to give resources without smothering student groups in reporting requirements is one of the ecosystem’s distinguishing features.

“Here are resources. Go,” he says. “Create something awesome.”

He also sees the Finnish startup scene through the lens of a word that does not translate neatly into English: talkoot. It means people coming together to work for free toward a shared cause. A neighborhood spring cleanup can be talkoot. So can building a startup conference with thousands of volunteers.

“That’s how Slush was built,” Suomalainen said. “The conference is run by 2,000 people working for free.”

IDEAS TO IMPACT

Aalto is simultaneously building a research commercialization pipeline to turn ideas into impact. A researcher with a promising idea can work with an innovation advisor, file an invention disclosure, seek funding ,and potentially enter incubator support.

At any given time, Aalto has more than 30 research commercialization projects underway, Ganoo says, and is particularly strong in tech transfer activities. It has received more than €60 million in research-to-business funding.

Aalto has also been trying to speed up spinouts. Its target is that a company should be able to spin out in 30 days, compared to a process that previously could take six months to a year.

For business students, the research pipeline can create opportunities to join companies before they fully become companies. Students may work as junior business developers on commercialization projects, then stay with the venture if it spins out.

Vu Tran, a master’s student in sustainable entrepreneurship, came to Finland from Vietnam. After realizing that it would be difficult to find sustainability jobs in the country without speaking Finnish, she applied to the Founder Sprint.

She is now a business developer at Lignum Medical which is commercializing technology developed at Aalto. Tran reports directly to the CEO while working with researchers and scientists.

She describes Aalto, and the entrepreneurship training she received there, as a place where students can test ideas, access infrastructure, meet a cohort, get coaching, use tools and make beginner mistakes before the stakes become too high.

“I am destined to make mistakes and will struggle on the path to success,” she says. “But because I am more well prepared, I will make less expensive mistakes.”

Paths like Tran’s show students that they do not need to be scientists to work in med tech, satellites, biomaterials and energy. Deep-tech companies need business talent, too.

“They don’t need to have the PhD in quantum technology to work for a quantum computer company,” Ganoo says. “Similarly, they don’t need to know everything about biomaterials to be able to work and support a biomaterial startup.”

BACK TO THE FACTORY

Nowhere is Aalto’s practical entrepreneurship focus more visible than in the Design Factory. It is filled with open workstations surrounded by inventories of tools and components — nuts, screws, connectors, switches, sensors and other gadgets students can pull from as they build. Specialized equipment for machining, electronics, 3D printing and other forms of fabrication lets teams move quickly from rough ideas to working prototypes.

Design Factory teaches about a dozen courses itself, and its facilities support roughly 40 other Aalto courses, says Tua Björklund, factory director and associate professor. The model has since been adopted in 39 universities around the world.

Its most visible program is the Product Development Project (PdP). And in May, PdP hosted its 30th anniversary gala, filling every corner of the factory with student booths demonstrating their projects – from new building materials created from industrial waste to automated processes for analyzing geological cores.

PdP teams begin with an industry or organizational challenge. Over the course of nine months, students learn to conduct user research, benchmark and frame the problem, narrow the scope, and build toward a working prototype. Each team is given €10,000 along with the factory’s tools and space to work. Sponsoring companies retain IP, but students may still be named as inventors on patent applications.

The course was created 30 years ago by Kalevi “Eetu” Ekman, now senior advisor at Aalto University School of Engineering and a founding creator of the Design Factory. The World Cultural Council honored his vision with its Jose Vasconcelos World Award of Education in 2016.

Ekman wanted to fix what he saw as fundamental problems in how universities support entrepreneurship and hands‑on, interdisciplinary work. He describes entrepreneurship as a virus one must catch by rolling up your sleeves and getting your knuckles dirty.

“In universities, we are very good at building very sterile environments of classrooms and auditoriums where I don’t see much entrepreneurship. Even the virus dies there,” he says.

All around him, and the 30th PdP gala, was the impact of what he built.

Team HUS created a smart urine-monitoring system for patient care, and Aalto students turned their booth into a makeshift hospital room to demonstrate how it works. Prinsys developed leak detection sensors and software for commercial properties. “Buildings are like babies. They don’t tell you when they’re wet,” reads their tagline. Unstacked – Hydrolift is developing a hydrogen fuel cell to power 0-emission drones.

If entrepreneurship is a virus, Ekman’s factory and course are the superspreader events. Between 150 and 200 Aalto students from all of Aalto’s academic departments take PdP each year, with about 4,100 alumni so far. It’s turned out 400 protypes, several of which have led to startups, patents, and jobs for the creators — or for people they turn around and hire themselves.

That, for Ekman, is the real measure of whether a university has cultivated entrepreneurship.

“Every time when I hear someone talking about academic unemployment, I think something is badly wrong,” Ekman says.

“My idea is that our graduates, whatever they do, should be the ones who create jobs, not searching for a job.”

DON’T MISS: HOW AALTO PLANS TO GROW BEYOND FINLAND’S ‘SMALL POND’ AND WHAT IT’S LIKE TO TEACH IN A NORTH KOREAN BUSINESS SCHOOL 

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