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Peter Kelly, what is your role in Aalto?

I am “Senior Lecturer in High Growth Entrepreneurship” which doesn’t quite capture what I do. I call myself Connector. I connect students with opportunities, ideas with action, and sometimes even people with their own potential.

This year marks my 10,000th day in Finland. I’ve been here through the Nokia highs and lows, the startup booms and busts, and from the very beginning of what would become Aalto University. I have had a front-row seat to its evolution, and in some small way, I hope to have helped shape it.

What brought you ���ʵ���?

Love, not the Finnish weather. As the Canadian ambassador once told me, I caught the “Finnish disease” it’s terminal if you marry a Finn!  So, I pivoted. I could have been running an entrepreneurship center back in Indiana or in London, but here I am.

I was actually part of one of the three universities that merged in���ʵ���. I was one of the pioneers at Aalto in teaching Entrepreneurial related subjects long before it was a trend.

What makes the IEM (Industrial Engineering and Management) Master’s program at Aalto unique?

Usually, people expect me to say something about rankings or course content.

But here’s the thing: content is content. Brilliant faculty around the world are teaching similar stuff. It’s not the material. It’s the context.

What makes Aalto different is the ecosystem; a startup-friendly, design-driven, risk-taking culture where students don’t just study innovation, they embrace it.

Aalto is one of the only places I know where students take real agency over their education. They don’t just show up. They actively shape their education. We are small, remote, and underdogs in the rankings game. Paradoxically, this puts Aalto in an extremely advantageous position. The higher an institution is in the rankings, the more conservative and risk averse it gets. Aalto can explore radically new paths and take risks. I see this as an enormous and often underappreciated strategic advantage.

How do you teach how to become a successful entrepreneur?

I remember walking into HUT’s (Helsinki University of Technology aka Aalto’s predecessor) main lecture hall – seating capacity in the 100’s – but only 20 students enrolled in the first New Venture Development class offered in English. But what an astounding group of pathbreakers they proved to be including the founders of Supercell and CRF Health. What started as a spark turned into a flame. The face of the entrepreneurial ecosystem is very familiar to me; so many of my previous students go on to start, support and stimulate new venture creation.

But the thing is great ideas don’t usually leap straight from the classroom into unicorn land. What I have seen over the years is students soaking it in here, going out to industry, building experience and networks… and then launching. And when they do, I recognize them. Not because I told them what to do, but because I saw the potential seed planted way back.

Successful entrepreneurship often doesn’t follow a script. And the classroom isn’t a classroom. It’s a stage.

Teaching for me involves a lot of improvisation, a guided and highly structured group dynamic built on a philosophy of “yes … and”. Everyone’s voice and input is valuable. My students are an incredible source of inspiration and creative insight. Give them a little guidance and encouragement, they can take you to places you never dreamed of.  Mix in a little prototyping and you put them in the creative frame of mind to challenge assumptions and test out new ideas.

How about collaboration with companies?

Close collaboration with industry is in IEM’s DNA. As the entrepreneurial ecosystem became established, companies began to realize that Aalto students are a wellspring of creative insights to harness. No surprise to me. Students ask bold, curious, uncomfortable questions, the kind people inside companies are too scared or too conditioned to ask.

Given, the transformative potential of AI, the need to actively embrace creativity is now. We are embracing Radical Creativity in Aalto which implies open-minded exploration of new opportunities. It is precisely in this type of context that ideation between “experts” and “novices” is most needed. AI is developing at a speed and fidelity that makes many established games like university look “old”.

What would you tell someone who’s never heard of Aalto?

I’d tell them this is a place where your inexperience is your strength. Where we don’t expect you to have it all figured out. Where asking the right question is sometimes more valuable than having the right answer.

For the past 15 years, I have run a “How to Network” session during orientation week in the fall. University is a social network concept. Aalto has taken an active interest in providing networking opportunities, but we presume that students know how to and have the confidence to network in the first place. You get as much out of a network as you invest into it; that to my mind is the concept of “social” networking.

What do you hope students take away?

I hope they feel empowered to act. Not to wait for someone else to tell them when it’s time. I won’t tell you to start a company. But I’ll give you tools, mindsets, questions and then step back.

What’s it like being a lecturer at Aalto?

I don’t really think of myself that way. Instead of a lecturer, I’m a positive non-conformist. Someone who experiments. Who prototypes ideas in real time and helps the system evolve. If I don’t have the courage to ask why not and experiment, how can I expect students to?

The most gratifying thing for me is to see my students take agency in discovering and exploring opportunities by having the courage to ask, “why not?” 

That’s Aalto. That’s IEM. That’s what happens when you let the students loose.