Universities Have Everything Needed for Entrepreneurship. Except One Thing.

Picture this: You're a brilliant engineering student with an idea that could change how we solve a real problem. You have the technical knowledge. You have access to the best minds in your field. You have labs, equipment, funding opportunities. And yet, when you pitch your idea to someone in administration, what you get back is ten very rational reasons why it won't work.

The building blocks are all there. The ingredients are sitting right in front of you. But they're in separate containers. And nobody has bothered to teach you how to mix them.

This is the paradox of entrepreneurship in academia. Universities are positioned as the birthplaces of innovation. They produce research. They generate ideas. They attract brilliant people. And yet, most universities are structurally designed to prevent the very thing we keep saying we want more of: entrepreneurial thinking.

I recently talked with Andrew Maxwell, a professor at York University in Toronto who has spent his career working at the intersection of academia, government, and business. His background is fascinating—engineering degree, then business degree, then behavioral economics research, then bringing all of it together in a way that most academics never figure out how to do. He's been running entrepreneurship programs, building innovation ecosystems, and watching what actually works versus what fails spectacularly.

And he's discovered something that most university administrators don't want to admit: The problem isn't ideas. The problem is that universities are built on assumptions about how the world works that are no longer true.

The System Was Never Built for This

Here's where it gets uncomfortable. Universities don't have a technology problem. They don't lack resources. They lack organizational structure that makes collaboration across disciplines possible.

Andrew pointed out something obvious once you see it: Universities have faculties. Departments. Silos. Each one responsible for a specific domain of knowledge. And those silos made sense when you could divide the world into distinct disciplines. But the world doesn't actually work that way anymore.

Real problems—the ones worth solving—require multiple perspectives. A healthcare innovation needs medical knowledge AND business knowledge AND behavioral psychology AND design thinking. But a student in the engineering faculty doesn't naturally interact with someone in the business school. They're literally in different buildings. Different cultures. Different reward systems.

So when innovation comes along, it doesn't come from the silos. It comes from the spaces between them. And universities have spent the last hundred years optimizing those spaces out of existence.

Andrew was in a meeting at York where the university had decided they wanted to build an innovation lab on campus. The vision was clear. The need was legitimate. Everyone in the room said they were enthusiastic. And then each person listed ten reasons why their department couldn't participate. Budget constraints. Timeline conflicts. Existing commitments. Departmental priorities.

But here's what Andrew realized—the real barrier wasn't any of that. It was that people couldn't see a different way. They were trapped inside the existing structure so completely that imagining something outside of it was almost impossible. It required behavioral change. And behavioral change is scary.

The Incentive Structure Rewards Everything Except What You Actually Want

Andrew discovered something that most people in academia know but won't say out loud: Universities have an incentive problem, not an innovation problem.

In universities, you get rewarded for a very specific set of things. Publications, primarily. How many papers did you publish? How prestigious was the journal? How many citations did you get? These are the things that matter for tenure. These are the things that matter for funding. These are the things that matter for your reputation.

But entrepreneurship? Starting companies? Building new things? Creating impact in the real world? There's no box on the form for that. There's no tenure credit. There's no citation count. There's just the thing you did that nobody in the university really cares about because it doesn't advance the tenure process.

This creates a perverse situation where the smartest, most ambitious people in the room are incentivized to do exactly the opposite of what the university keeps saying it wants more of.

Compare this to the business world. In business, the incentives are brutal and clear. Make money or you're out. Deliver results or the company fails. This creates a kind of alignment that academia will never have. In the corporate world, you might have internal politics and turf wars, but everyone is ultimately pointing toward the same finish line: survival and growth.

Universities don't have that. They have competing finish lines.

Andrew worked with a major corporation that wanted to encourage innovation behavior in a small team of twenty people. The owner was struggling with how to incentivize it. Andrew suggested something simple: Take one of the season tickets you're already using for client entertainment—the eight games a month—and instead of giving them to customers, give one ticket to the "employee of the month" as recognition for doing something innovative. It cost the owner nothing. The tickets were already his. But suddenly, people started trying things. People started thinking about what was possible. The recognition worked better than any formal innovation program.

This is the thing about incentives—they don't need to be expensive or complicated. They just need to point people in the direction you actually want them to go.

What Actually Works: Forcing Interdisciplinary Work

Andrew has seen a few examples where universities actually managed to break the pattern. And in every case, they had one thing in common: The structure forced people to work together across disciplines.

In Israel, the government decided to fund entrepreneurship centers at universities. But they didn't give funding to a single department. They said: "We'll fund this, but only if you bring together partners from different schools. Only if you force collaboration." The Hebrew University was the most successful because they actually identified what they were good at and what their gaps were. Then they brought partners into the proposal who filled those gaps. Those partners became integral to what they were doing.

In Canada, the government created "super clusters" around technology and region—offering hundreds of millions of dollars to companies, universities, and institutions if they would agree to work together. But here's what happened: They funded the collaboration without changing the actual mechanisms of how people work. So everyone took the money and then went back to doing business as usual, just with a little more government cash. The collaboration structure wasn't there. The forums weren't there. There was nothing that actually changed how people worked together.

One worked. One didn't. The difference was whether they actually changed the system or just added money to the existing system.

The Behavioral Problem That Nobody Wants to Talk About

Andrew spent years studying behavioral economics and behavioral change. And here's what he learned that applies directly to universities: Technological change is easy. Behavioral change is hard. But everyone acts like it's the opposite.

When the university wanted to build an innovation lab with organic waste technology, the administrators spent half the meeting talking about the technical challenges. "How do we integrate this technology? What engineering issues do we have to solve?" But halfway through, Andrew stopped the conversation. "The technical challenges aren't going to kill this project," he said. "The behavioral challenges will."

The barriers aren't engineering. The barriers are that the facility manager doesn't know how to work with an engineer. The lab director doesn't know how to work with someone from business school. The finance person doesn't see how they fit in. Everyone is comfortable in their silo. Pulling them out and asking them to collaborate is asking them to be uncomfortable.

Most organizations skip this part. They build the structure and assume people will figure out how to operate in it. That's a catastrophic assumption. People won't figure it out. They'll resist it, work around it, or quietly sabotage it because it feels dangerous.

The Thing Nobody Admits About Teaching

Andrew said something near the end of our conversation that probably explains half the problems in higher education: Most professors teach the way they were taught twenty years ago. And that's almost certainly not the right way anymore.

Think about that for a second. Your professor in 2024 is probably teaching exactly like their professor taught them in 1990. The world has changed. Technology has changed. The way people learn has changed. The problems we're trying to solve have changed. But the fundamental approach—lecture, listen, exam—is almost frozen in time.

Andrew is conscious of this. He's constantly experimenting with how he teaches. He's adding new tools, new approaches, new ways of engaging students. But he's the exception. Most aren't. They're comfortable. They've taught the same class the same way for ten years. Changing that feels risky.

But here's the tension: If you want to teach entrepreneurship, you can't teach it the way your professor taught you business. Entrepreneurship requires experimentation. Failure. Learning from doing. It requires behavioral change and discomfort. And you can't teach that through lectures and exams.

Why This Matters Beyond Academia

If you work in a large organization—any large organization—you're living in a version of the university problem. You have departments. You have silos. You have incentive structures that don't point everyone in the same direction. You have people who can't imagine doing things differently because the existing system has worked for them.

The question isn't whether you can innovate within that system. The question is whether you're willing to change the system.

Most organizations aren't. They say they want innovation while maintaining all the conditions that make innovation impossible. They want interdisciplinary collaboration while rewarding individual achievement. They want risk-taking while punishing failure. They want new thinking while maintaining old incentive structures.

It doesn't work. And it won't work until someone is willing to actually change something, not just talk about changing something.

What Actually Works

Based on everything Andrew has learned, there are a few principles that actually create conditions where entrepreneurship and innovation can happen:

First, you have to make it easy. Remove barriers. Create dedicated funding. Give people protected time. Make collaboration possible, not just theoretically but practically.

Second, you have to change incentives. Tie rewards to things you actually want. For universities, that means making entrepreneurship part of what gets you ahead. For corporations, that means connecting compensation to collaborative work, not just individual achievement.

Third, you have to start with multidisciplinary teams—and I mean really multidisciplinary, not just mechanical engineers working with electrical engineers. You need people who look at problems from completely different perspectives. You need the psychologist in the room with the engineer. You need the designer with the accountant. Because the breakthroughs come from the collision of different ways of seeing.

Fourth, you have to accept that this takes time. This isn't something that happens in a quarter or a semester. This is a multi-year journey of changing how people think and work together. And if you're not willing to commit to that, don't bother starting.

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Want the Full Story?

If you want to hear Andrew's full perspective on building innovation ecosystems in academia and what he's learned about how universities differ from the corporate world, listen to his full conversation on The School of Innovation podcast.

Yaniv Corem's interview with Andrew Maxwell goes deep into why universities fail at innovation even though they have all the pieces, and what actually needs to change to make it work. It's forty minutes that will make you question how your own organization is structured.

Because here's the thing about entrepreneurship in academia—and in most organizations, really: You can't build something new inside a system designed for something old. You can't ask people to be comfortable with failure in an environment that rewards perfection. You can't ask people to collaborate across silos while maintaining the silos. Something has to give. And if you're not willing to let something give, you're not actually trying to innovate. You're just talking about it.