Building an entrepreneurial culture
Entrepreneurial is one of the University of St Andrews’ strategic themes, shaping how the institution approaches education, research, and engagement with the wider world.
But what does it mean to be entrepreneurial in practice, and how do we embed it in what we do every day?
Anna Brattström, Professor of Entrepreneurship in the University’s Business School, is perfectly placed to answer these questions.
Anna plays a central role in advancing this agenda through her research and teaching, with a particular focus on the people and relationships behind innovation. Her work explores how individuals, teams, and organisations come together to develop new technologies and ventures, and how entrepreneurial activity can be both impactful and responsible.
Anna joined the University in January 2024, so this month marks a year since a significant professional and personal transition. After completing her PhD at the Stockholm School of Economics in Sweden, she spent around a decade at Lund University before moving to St Andrews with her family.
“I moved here with family – two teenagers, one husband – and now we are joined by our dog too.”
Anna works at the intersection of entrepreneurship, innovation, and collaboration, with a particular interest in how entrepreneurial activity can create value while remaining socially and ethically grounded.
“Entrepreneurship can be many different things. But I like to think of it as the organised activity of working together with others to realise ideas and visions of things that do not yet exist.
“It may involve small, local initiatives – the local shop owner on Market Street who runs a small-scale business – or much larger visions of possible futures.
“Entrepreneurship is the process of taking those ideas into substance, so they actually become something.”
Anna’s thinking draws on classic entrepreneurship theory, including Joseph Schumpeter’s idea of entrepreneurship as a force of creative destruction.
“It’s a process of creation, but it’s also a process of destruction, in the sense that established power structures or organisational structures or market dynamics get destroyed as new things come up.”
Entrepreneurship can be a powerful driver of innovation, economic growth, job creation, and technological change, as underscored by this year’s Nobel prize in economics. Anna stresses the importance of responsibility.
“When we foster entrepreneurship, we want to try our best to make sure that we take care of what’s being destroyed, and that we do not just create things for the sake of it, but foster entrepreneurship that is beneficial to the world.”
Anna has been closely involved in the launch of the new MSc in Entrepreneurship at the Business School, which welcomed its first cohort of students in September.
“We try to teach our students how to work systematically with new ideas and turn those ideas into some sort of reality. The programme is deliberately hands-on.
“We teach them about entrepreneurship theory, of course, but we really want them to go out and do stuff and create things, and do that in the safe space of a university. Trying and failing and learning in that process.”
A central aim of the programme is to challenge persistent myths about entrepreneurs.
“Sometimes people think of entrepreneurs as these heroic individuals with fantastic capacity for forward thinking, sort of superhumans. And that’s just not it.”
“Entrepreneurs come in all shapes and forms. Some are extroverts, some are introverts. Some are analytical, others are doers.”
What can be taught, she argues, is method.
“Entrepreneurship is maybe not so much about the idea, but taking that idea, implementing it, and making it happen. And teaching our students how to do that in a systematic way is what we try to do.”
The MSc programme collaborates closely with Eden Campus, whose networks and mentoring opportunities support students’ entrepreneurial development.
“The students have mentors, they work on their own ideas, but they also work on others’ ideas. And the network of Eden Campus is really useful for building an ecosystem around entrepreneurship.”
The programme is a one-year master’s degree, and while some graduates may go on to start their own ventures, many will move into established organisations.
“Entrepreneurship is not only something that start-ups do. It’s a way of working that you would need in any organisation.”
Anna’s research centres on what she describes as “the people side of innovation and entrepreneurship”.
She studies how people come together to develop new technologies and ventures, focusing on team dynamics, decision-making in start-up teams, and how social norms shape interactions in entrepreneurial contexts. Her work also examines how firms collaborate through alliances and ecosystems to develop new, or more sustainable, technologies.
These questions have become increasingly important as entrepreneurship has moved from the margins to the mainstream.
“Fifteen years ago, entrepreneurship was something peripheral individuals or firms were doing. Now it’s a strategic pillar of every other university in Europe.”
Similar shifts can be seen across different fields, including in areas such as defence, global aid, finance, and manufacturing. This widespread embrace of entrepreneurship raises difficult questions.
“If we move fast and break things – which is sort of the imperative of entrepreneurship – what does that mean in medicine or defence? What kind of moral dilemmas emerge?”
Failure, Anna notes, is an inherent part of entrepreneurship.
“Most entrepreneurial initiatives fail. That’s just the name of the game. What makes the difference is what you learn from those failures and how fast you can fail, ideally on a small budget, not a big one.
“We’re in the midst of huge technological shifts. Generative AI will most likely have a massive impact on organisational work and on universities.
“We can at least try to create the conditions where we can experiment around that future without making people feel unsafe or unhappy.”
The University’s strategic aims around the entrepreneurial theme centre on fostering a culture of innovation among our students and staff, and offering support and funding so they can progress their ideas, while demonstrating how people and ideas can move between universities, industry and the wider world.
With Anna in post, and the new MSc creating the innovators of tomorrow, those aims are truly coming to life.
“It’s easy to think of entrepreneurship as just new technology. But the really transformative power lies in understanding people – what is meaningful, what is valuable, and what kind of future we want to create.”
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