Entrepreneurship

The speed of change at the workplace is breathtaking. The change can be seen as increased temporary and project jobs available through a platform economy (Amazon, Uber, Wolt, etc.) In many parts of the world, self-employment has become very common; many people do not even aim for long-term employment.

In Finland, the development is going in the same direction. Invoicing services developed for lean entrepreneurship are already used by 100,000 citizens each year, and the number of users is growing at a rate of 20 per cent a year. This phenomenon is expected to become even stronger in the future.

Many researchers have predicted that, in the latter half of the 2030s, as many as 60 per cent of Finns will be entrepreneurs or freelancers and only 40 per cent paid employees.

Not everyone has to establish a start-up; simply employing yourself in any way counts as entrepreneurship. In the future, this will concern nearly everyone of us, whether we like it or not.

From the perspective of entrepreneurship education, this transformation of work involves completely new challenges. In order to survive, everyone of us should understand the basics of entrepreneurship. At least we should know how to determine the price of our competence and commercialise it – and act as your own boss. 

With respect to research and development, Laurea wants to be a forerunner in this transformation of work. We want to understand and develop those future skills that will be required of self-employed people.

With respect to projects, we want to provide unemployed and employed people alike, regardless of nationality and age, with similar self-employment opportunities. These different target groups provide valuable research data for entrepreneurship training.

We are interested in all types of project cooperation in this field.

More information: