In recent years, entrepreneurship has become a buzzword across campuses and industries. Start-up culture, hackathons, and innovation challenges are everywhere. And yet, one question keeps resurfacing:
Why does entrepreneurship still feel like it belongs to business students?
This question is personal for me. I’ve seen it come up again and again in different countries, sectors, and institutions. Whether I was at grassroots hubs, government accelerators, or now leading student entrepreneurship at Portal in Trinity College Dublin, the pattern stays the same: entrepreneurship education rarely crosses disciplinary lines.
Business-school ideas still influence how we teach, promote, and think about entrepreneurship. Because of this, students in Arts and Humanities, Social Sciences, Nursing, Sciences, and other less-represented fields often don’t see entrepreneurship as something that fits their studies. This is where the university’s broader institutional role becomes essential. Addressing this gap means moving past standalone programmes and focusing on how entrepreneurship is shaped by institutional commitment, educational practices, and the culture of teaching, learning, and collaboration, as reflected in ACEEU standards.
A university is more than just a place that hosts entrepreneurship programs. It acts like a power grid, deciding if entrepreneurial thinking spreads across all faculties or stays stuck in a few areas. When institutions treat entrepreneurship as a shared goal, building it into their strategy, culture, and teaching, the whole ecosystem shifts.
Whole-university approaches typically include:
Institutional commitment: Entrepreneurship is built into mission and leadership priorities.
A supportive culture: Creativity, experimentation, and opportunity-seeking are normalised across faculties.
Educational integration: Entrepreneurship adapted to the epistemic norms of each discipline.
Structures and enablers: Hubs, incentives, pathways, and student-centred supports that keep the “grid” connected.
These ideas align with the ACEEU Accreditation Framework, which stresses that culture, education, and institutional commitment, among the 15 standards, are the foundation of an entrepreneurial university. In practice, the emphasis shifts from listing institutional features to understanding how entrepreneurship becomes part of the university’s lived experience. But this isn’t just about getting accredited. It’s about seeing a simple truth:
Entrepreneurship grows best when it is supported by the whole institution, not just offered as an option.
The Invisible Divide
Students in nursing, humanities, music, or pure sciences often don’t see themselves in how entrepreneurship is taught or promoted. It’s not that they lack ambition or ideas. The problem is that entrepreneurship is still usually shown as something commercial, corporate, or focused on tech.
For many, entrepreneurship means business plans, pitching competitions, venture capital and rapid scaling. These are all valid parts of entrepreneurship, but they don’t tell the whole story.
At its heart, entrepreneurship means creating value, solving problems, and dealing with uncertainty. These are universal skills that matter just as much to historians and linguists as to business graduates.
And crucially, not every graduate needs to start a company.
Entrepreneurship is not limited to new venture creation; innovation within existing organizations can be equally impactful. Spotify’s “Discover Weekly,” for example, wasn’t created by a start-up founder; it emerged from a small internal team experimenting with recommendations. It went on to transform the platform.
This shows that entrepreneurial behavior can happen anywhere, even inside the workplaces where students hope to work.
So why does the divide persist?
Culture Is the Curriculum
The main barrier isn’t only the curriculum. It’s also the culture.
Every discipline has its own traditions, values, and ways of knowing. In some fields, entrepreneurship is seen as too commercial, utilitarian, disconnected from the discipline’s purpose. In other fields, entrepreneurship is simply invisible. It’s never mentioned or encouraged.
When entrepreneurship is taught using business terms like market opportunity, value proposition, or competitive advantage, it can feel unfamiliar and unwelcoming.
Universities have a unique opportunity to address this. Instead of simply adding programmes, they can serve as drivers of cultural change by:
reframing entrepreneurship around creativity, social impact, community innovation, and opportunity creation
adapting entrepreneurship education to fit disciplinary thinking
validating multiple forms of innovation, not just tech and commercial
building interdisciplinary spaces where silos naturally blur
We’re already seeing progress. More institutions are starting innovation hubs, incubators, and cross-faculty challenges. When these efforts match the norms of each discipline, instead of replacing them, student engagement increases a lot. More importantly, entrepreneurship is increasingly understood as an identity, not just a set of skills. Students internalise entrepreneurial behaviour through experiences like teamwork, pitching, feedback, and mentorship. But identity develops inside cultural contexts. If entrepreneurship doesn’t “fit” the disciplinary identity, students struggle to see themselves in it. Understanding the culture of each discipline isn’t optional. It’s the key to making entrepreneurship more inclusive. Recognising creativity, interpretation, cultural insight, critical thinking, and social awareness as entrepreneurial capacities allows students across disciplines to enter the conversation. Entrepreneurship becomes more than just a program. It turns into a shared opportunity for everyone.
What We’re Doing About It
With openincubator.ie, we’re working to close this gap.
We support students from any discipline to develop ideas, build skills, and connect with other innovators. Whether you’re in engineering, nursing, drama, history, languages, or science, you’ll find mentors, tools, and opportunities created with your context in mind.
What began as a small experiment is now one of Ireland’s largest interdisciplinary entrepreneurship initiatives:
5,500+ learners engaged
350 early-stage student ventures supported
12 partner universities
Students often tell us this is the first time entrepreneurship has felt like something for someone like me. Many of our best ventures have come from unexpected places such as Nursing, Languages, Humanities, and Drama. This proves that innovation thrives when everyone has access.
Tools We’ve Introduced
Zaur AI An AI-powered mentor providing personalised guidance to thousands of students.
Interdisciplinary Innovation Challenges Bringing students together to solve real-world problems.
Workshops & Toolkits Built around real needs, not just start-up pitches.
Innovation Aid Kits This is our most impactful development, created specifically for discipline-sensitive entrepreneurship.
Discipline-Sensitive Entrepreneurship
Over the past year, we shifted from running programmes to building a truly faculty-driven innovation model. Innovation looks different in Nursing than in Languages, and different again in Drama or Engineering. Instead of pushing generalised themes, we co-design tools with each faculty to make entrepreneurship meaningful within their ecosystem. The Innovation Aid Kit is the heart of this approach. Built through months of co-creation with faculty staff and students, each kit anchors innovation in the discipline’s own priorities and professional realities.
What’s Inside?
Innovation Opportunity Area Maps: highlight sector-relevant challenges and future trends, such as patient-care redesign and digital storytelling.
Technology Flashcards: show new tools, like AI and telehealth, and how they could change the discipline.
Inspiration Cards: real-world examples that translate abstract innovation into tangible possibilities.
Idea Conceptualisation Playbook: practical guide that takes students from problem exploration to prototype and pitch.
A More Inclusive Future
Entrepreneurship shouldn’t be an exclusive club. It should be a way of thinking and working that’s open to everyone.
Universities are in a unique position to make this happen. When higher education builds a culture that values curiosity, teamwork, and creative problem-solving, students from every discipline can finally see themselves as part of the innovation world.
To support this shift, entrepreneurship education must function as a translator rather than a template, which requires rethinking how entrepreneurship is taught and to adapt its concepts so they resonate with the diverse languages of engineering, arts, medicine, social sciences, and beyond. Diversity is not simply accommodated; it becomes a source of value creation in its own right. Cultural diversity, in this sense, is no longer a barrier to participation but a driver of richer, more socially grounded innovation.
When universities commit to this approach, they empower drama students to rethink digital storytelling, nursing students to redesign care pathways, historians to create socially informed ventures, and linguists to develop cultural-tech tools. In other words, innovation starts to grow in every part of the university, not just in the usual places.
For university leaders and managers, this highlights the importance of treating entrepreneurship as an institutional responsibility. As reflected in ACEEU’s standards, sustainable entrepreneurial universities emerge when leadership decisions align commitment, culture, and education in practice.
If you’re a student, educator, or someone with an idea, take the first step. You don’t have to call yourself an entrepreneur to start acting like one.
Universities exist to open these doors. Our job is simply to walk through them.
