Research at Entrepreneurship
We are Finland's leading, internationally active Entrepreneurship Research Unit. We produce new information about entrepreneurship and its significance, manifestations and promotion in society.
Research focuses on
- entrepreneurship and new working modes
- entrepreneurial behaviour and business growth
Selected ongoing research projects
The Creative Economies’ Value Creation for Finland’s Success and Well-being (CREVELL) project (2024-2027) is funded by the Finnish Cultural Foundation through its Additional Million Euro Funding to Science programme. The project explores the current and future role of creative economies in supporting Finland’s success and well-being.
CREVELL builds on extensive interview and survey data collected in the earlier DISCE and ECOCRIN projects and will culminate in Future Scenario Workshops examining pathways for Finland's future success and well-being. Current research themes include innovative creative ecosystems, creative entrepreneurship, ecosystem viability, and policy approaches that support entrepreneurship and value creation.
The project is led by Professor Jarna Heinonen and brings together researchers from entrepreneurship, futures studies, education, and cultural heritage studies. The Entrepreneurship Unit team includes Jarna Heinonen, Kaisa Hytönen, Tommi Pukkinen, Pekka Stenholm, Ulla Hytti, and Katriina Siivonen, together with doctoral researchers investigating value co-creation and entrepreneurship in creative industries.
The HI-GEE project explores the role of highly educated immigrants as employees and entrepreneurs in promoting business growth. You can read about the project in Finnish from the Foundation for Economic Education’s website.
Finland's future competitiveness depends on its ability to attract, retain, and effectively utilise international talent. The HI-GEE project investigates how highly educated immigrants contribute to the growth and internationalisation of Finnish SMEs, both through employment and entrepreneurship. The project also examines the opportunities and challenges that immigrant entrepreneurs face when establishing and growing businesses in Finland.
Key research questions include:
- How do Finnish SMEs recruit and integrate international talent?
- What factors support or hinder immigrant entrepreneurship in Finland?
- How can international talent contribute to the international growth and competitiveness of Finnish firms?
The project builds on previous research on the experiences of international professionals in Finland, including the HIWE project, and is closely linked to ongoing doctoral research on immigrant entrepreneurship within the Entrepreneurship Unit. Through collaboration with international scholars and engagement with academic and practitioner communities, the project contributes new knowledge on talent attraction, entrepreneurial ecosystems, and inclusive economic growth.
Professor Ulla Hytti serves as Principal Investigator of the project. The research team includes Anna Elkina, Tommi Pukkinen and Satu Aaltonen.
Further information on earlier related research is available at www.hiwe.fi.
Featured past projects
Research project focusing on "Academic Entrepreneurship as a social process" (ACE) ws conducted together with the University of Eastern Finland. The four-year project (2016-2020) was funded by the Academy of Finland and studied academic entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship education and training in the transformation of universities marked by financial pressure and the growing importance of societal impact.
Using surveys, interviews, observation and documents combined with novel methods of analysis, the project shed light on the change, diversity and durability of entrepreneurial activity in universities. The project compared the strategies, forms and experiences of academic entrepreneurship in different universities while studying the construction and evolution of academic entrepreneur identities on an individual level.
The project aimed at a holistic picture of the forms, opportunities and problems in Finnish academic entrepreneurship. The research results offered decision-makers, researchers and universities new knowledge on the goals, forms and attractiveness of academic entrepreneurship.
The multidisciplinary project combined research in entrepreneurship and innovation management with perspectives from psychology and education. The researchers aimed to develop theory that will help understand the construction and change of academic entrepreneurship as a social process.
The project was tightly connected to the University of Turku’s entrepreneurship strategy and the Entrepreneurial University initiative. The project at the Turku School of Economics was led by Professor Ulla Hytti. The research team included also Postdoctoral researchers Kirsi Peura and Inna Kozlinka and two PhD students Anna Elkina and Kaisu Paasio.
Entrepreneurship Unit and VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd produced jointly an evidence based study of business start-up activity for Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment of Finland. The aim of our research project was to create a snapshot of business start-up activity in Finland and the factors influencing it on the basis of the GEM survey data, Statistics Finland's data and other national and international reference data, research reports, scientific articles and project workshops.
The study provided recommendations for policy measures and choices which can contribute to increasing the business start-up activity and to boosting the founding of growth-oriented employer companies in Finland. The project paid special attention to how different groups of company founders should be taken into account in policy measures and choices, and what a number of benchmark countries, relevant to Finland, have done to facilitate start-up activity and establishment of growth-oriented companies. The statistical analysis found out the demographics of business founders and what kind of companies are being set up, how growth-oriented start-ups are and how the activity of starting a business is distributed by region and industry. This provided an indication of the importance of business start-up activity to the national economy and an impetus to identifying policy measures that can facilitate business start-up and growth-oriented early-stage entrepreneurship in Finland. In the workshops, the preliminary results of the research were validated and ideas for new entrepreneurship policy openings were co-created with key stakeholders.
The focus of the study was on supporting the implementation of the Entrepreneurship Strategy under the Government Programme. The project ran for 2021–20223 and was led by Professor Jarna Heinonen (jarna.heinonen@utu.fi) and the project team in Entrepreneurship unit included Adjunct Professor Pekka Stenholm (pekka.stenholm@utu.fi) and Senior researcher Tommi Pukkinen (tommi.pukkinen@utu.fi).
DISCE project (https://disce.eu/) is set to improve and enhance the growth, inclusivity and sustainability of the cultural and creative industries (CCIs) in the EU. Overall, the ambitious and wider policy goals of DISCE are:
to support the development patterns of CCIs within the EU through research on new business models and inclusive growth; and
to re-shape understanding of what ‘inclusive and sustainable growth’ consists of in this context, shifting the CCIs (and CCIs policy) towards strategic goals of ‘cultural development’ that encompass both GDP and human flourishing.
From the policy perspective DISCE aims to unlock the potential of the CCIs in Europe at regional, national and European level. DISCE is funded by the European Commission, via the Horizon 2020 programme.
Entrepreneurship unit is the coordinator of DISCE, Professor Jarna Heinonen being the Principal Investigator of the project. The other research members of the consortium are the King’s College London (KCL) from the United Kingdom, the Gran Sasso Science Institute (GSSI) from Italy, and the Stockholm School of Economics (SSE) in Riga, Latvia. The consortium is completed with a Belgian based non-profit consultancy Culture and Media Agency Europe aisbl (CUMEDIAE) and the European network of non-governmental cultural centres based in Sweden Trans Europe Halles (TEH), who will together assume both the communications and stakeholder engagement within the CCIs. DISCE runs for 2019-2022.
Follow DISCE in social media:
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Website https://disce.eu/
The need for highly skilled international talent was broadly recognised in Finland. HIWE was a collaborative research project between Turku School of Economics and the University of Eastern Finland that ran from 2022 to 2024. The research sought to enhance understanding of how to increase the involvement of highly skilled internationals in Finnish working life, innovation, and entrepreneurship.
HIWE research concentrated on generating bottom-up knowledge about how international talents experienced the Finnish labour market and entrepreneurial opportunities in Finland. The central question was whether existing innovation policies and practices could respond to the challenges that international experts considered important to them.
The researchers aimed to develop and test a new type of participatory model for innovation policy development. This collaborative model brought together international experts and key stakeholders with the goal of challenging traditional hierarchical decision-making in society. The model developed within the HIWE project supported the participation of international experts in the production of policy innovations. The project produced collaboratively written policy recommendations and a roadmap that can be used to translate the project's findings into policy action and practice.
The research project was conducted between 2022 and 2024. The team leader in Turku was Professor Ulla Hytti (ulla.hytti@utu.fi). The research team in Turku also included Project Researcher Satu Aaltonen (satu.aaltonen@utu.fi), Senior Researcher Tommi Pukkinen (tommi.pukkinen@utu.fi), and Doctoral Researcher Anna Elkina (anna.s.elkina@utu.fi).
Further information about the research consortium and the project remains available on the project website: www.hiwe.fi.
ECOCRIN (Sustainable and innovative creative ecosystems: Ecological Approach to Policy Innovation for Creative Sectors in Finland), a research project funded by Business Finland, came to its end in 2025.
The growth and innovation potential of the creative sectors is well recognised in Finland and globally, yet its impacts have largely remained unrealised. Overlooking this creative potential may also jeopardise the economic sustainability of the already fragmented creative sectors. The aim of the ECOCRIN project was to identify solutions for unlocking this potential by mapping the needs of creative ecosystems at the grassroots level, examining innovation and cultural policy frameworks in light of these needs, and developing a model for creating synergies between cultural and innovation policies together with local, regional, and national actors and stakeholders. Overall, the project sought new ways to design and implement policies that promote the sustainable growth and innovation of creative ecosystems.
The research project was conducted in 1.10.2023–30.9.2025. Professor Jarna Heinonen (jarna.heinonen@utu.fi) was the Principal Investigator of the project. The research team consisted of researchers from Turku School of Economics Entrepreneurship Unit, Finland Futures Research Centre and Turku School of Economics Pori Unit.
More information on the project from the project website: https://sites.utu.fi/ecocrin/
The main aim of the Transforming Entrepreneurship Education (TrEE) project was to change the direction and practice of entrepreneurship education in Europe.
The TrEE project focused on creating the resilience needed to address the major crises of our time and the growing complexity of the societal challenges associated with them, both ecological and social. Entrepreneurship has the potential to contribute to solving contemporary societal challenges, but it can also exacerbate them. The project sought to decouple entrepreneurship education (EE) from the creation of (high-growth) businesses and instead harness its creative potential to help enact more just futures for both people and the planet. This involved shifting towards innovation that does not deplete planetary resources, addressing social inequalities, and promoting greater inclusivity. In short, the project advocated justice for all forms of life, human and more-than-human. Achieving this required rethinking how entrepreneurship education is enacted, identifying new pedagogical premises, and developing new course formats, materials, and assignments.
Concretely, the project aimed to elaborate new pedagogical approaches, develop and validate relevant course designs, materials, and teaching interventions, and organize training activities for educators (educate-the-educator).
The TrEE project was conducted between 1 December 2022 and 31 December 2024. The project received funding from the Erasmus+ Cooperation Partnership programme.
The consortium consisted of representatives from six European higher education institutions: Professor Karin Berglund from Stockholm Business School at Stockholm University, Professor Sarah Dodd from the University of Strathclyde, Professor Ulla Hytti from the University of Turku, Professor Sarah Jack from Stockholm School of Economics, Serxia Lage Arias from the Instituto de Educación Secundaria Fernando Wirtz Suárez, and Associate Professor Karen Verduijn from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
Further information about the project remains available on the project website: transformingee.eu.
A project video is available on YouTube: Transforming Entrepreneurship Education (TrEE).
For further information, please contact Professor Ulla Hytti at the University of Turku: ulla.hytti@utu.fi.