Many business school applicants are hoping that they might graduate as entrepreneurs, and business schools are supporting them with these big ambitions. Let’s look at a great example of this. 

The 2026 Redstone University Startup Index, published by European venture capital firm Redstone, shows that Estonian Business School (EBS) is the most efficient startup-producing business school in Europe. Professor Meelis Kitsing, Rector of Estonian Business School (pictured above), sat down with us to explore the importance of entrepreneurship at business school and much more.

Here are his thoughts:

Why is entrepreneurship so important to EBS’s identity?

Entrepreneurship is part of how we see our purpose at EBS: a community for growth and responsibility that turns knowledge into actions and actions into impact. It is also one of the core pillars of our strategy. A classroom can teach the tools, but it cannot teach someone to act under ambiguity and uncertainty, and that is what the world now rewards. The culture is more important than formalised process. The Redstone index has a brief case study on EBS in which the authors make the same point. Entrepreneurial output depends on proximity to the ecosystem and on institutional culture, not on size or research funding. It also reflects my own experience.

I joined EBS as visiting faculty while I was working for a leading US advertising chain 30 years ago. Even then I was inspired by the entrepreneurial students at EBS. In 1999 I cofounded an e-commerce startup with two EBS students and other partners. So for me practice and teaching have always run together. Now I have had the pleasure of inviting some of my students back as guest speakers in the innovation course I teach at EBS. In my view, the emphasis on entrepreneurship is also not opposed to academic strength. After the exit from our startup, I started my MSc at LSE in 2000. LSE leads the Redstone entrepreneurship index category for large university ecosystems while also ranking highly on academic achievement (56th in QS and 52nd in Times Higher Education rankings, for instance).

What explains the Redstone result, and what does it say about the EBS ecosystem?

The index measures startup creation relative to a university’s budget, so it is an efficiency measure. We are not the largest business school, and we do not have the biggest budget. Following the report’s authors, I would credit three things. The first is a focused strategy that puts entrepreneurship at the centre. The second is deep integration with Estonia’s startup ecosystem, in a country with the highest number of unicorns per capita (12 unicorns for population of 1.3 million). The third is a culture evolving over decades, with diversity and constant experimentation. It tells us that closeness to the ecosystem can matter more than scale.

My own experience points the same way. Earlier this year I met the rector of a large Southern European university to discuss the impact of universities on entrepreneurship. That university has 50 times more students than EBS. According to its own analysis, its alumni and staff have created startups worth tens of billions. Using a similarly simple methodology, I found that the value of companies created by EBS alumni is only half that of the large university. In other words, a university 50 times larger has only twice our impact. This is just one example, but universities differ in how efficiently they use their resources, and so does the impact that follows.

Why does a venture building model (like TooEarly) matter for a modern business school?

TooEarly Ventures builds on earlier experiences in which EBS experimented with different approaches. We have been hosting the accelerator Startup Wise Guys, which was founded by our alumni and in which we have a stake. Startup Wise Guys has been involved in developing hundreds of startups all over Europe and Africa. The Financial Times has ranked them among the top 20 university related startup hubs in Europe, ahead of many similar hubs in the region. EBS has also invested in startups directly. One such example is Ready Player Me, where EBS invested in our students’ startup more than ten years ago. The company was recently acquired by Netflix, which obviously demonstrated that our students are capable of building globally competitive tech companies.

TooEarly Ventures acts as an institutional cofounder. It builds companies from scratch alongside founders, which an incubator or accelerator that advises existing startups does not. The process runs through discovery, about two months of validation and about six months of building. The studio sits in the EBS building and is open to students of all disciplines and from other universities. This matters because it makes entrepreneurship happen at the school, not only about the school. It lets students, researchers and experts work on real ventures together. I would call it a natural next step from the Redstone logic: if proximity to the ecosystem drives results, the school should build part of that ecosystem itself.

How important are EBS founders and alumni as role models?

Hugely important. Several of our alumni are founders of unicorns, which is a great inspiration and aspiration. But even more important, sharing both entrepreneurial successes and failures matters. Students should also learn from failures, which are part of the entrepreneurial experience in the broadest sense. Our mission as a university is to seek truth, which implies that our emphasis on entrepreneurship should not suffer from selection bias by focusing only on beautiful success stories, but should also address the uncertainties and risks that entrepreneurs face every day.

The Redstone report authors also highlight “numerous successful role models close by”, and I think that closeness is the key. Estonia’s entrepreneurial culture is very flat and unpretentious. Access to entrepreneurs is easier than elsewhere. A student who can meet a founder, and sees that the founder is someone who sat in the same lecture rooms, finds entrepreneurship more believable. Role models do not have to be unicorn founders. The role of diverse alumni is crucial. Among EBS alumni, 40% have founded companies, but we also have entrepreneurial alumni in the public sector and the nonprofit sector. There is a role for an unbounded entrepreneurial attitude across all walks of life.

Looking ahead, what must a business school like yours do so entrepreneurship keeps happening around the university?

Looking ahead, the first thing is to keep the diversity and the experimenting. There is no perfect model to copy, and diverse institutions and views make the system more resilient. I had the pleasure of hosting David Gleevely at EBS in May. He is one of the leaders of the Cambridge university ecosystem, and at our seminar he made the same point: diversity and decentralisation help create the right conditions.

The second thing is to stay focused. In a small country with limited resources, setting a clear target matters most. We focus on building an entrepreneurial university ecosystem. We emphasise the ecosystem, not just the university, because learning is a social experience. It involves a significant amount of tacit knowledge in addition to codified knowledge, which is easily available through LLMs. So we have to work with partners who do it every day in practice.

Third, we need to build structured pathways. I like the example set by LSE Generate, which offers incubation, an accelerator and funding for students and alumni. Alongside it, Houghton Street Ventures invests only in founders linked to LSE. The Redstone report makes an interesting observation about LSE: startups from a social science university develop faster and need less capital than deep tech or engineering startups. That suits a business school like ours.

Finally, we need to build bridges. We should favour connections across groups over groupthink. We also need funding models that recognise higher education as partly a public and partly a private good, so that the ecosystem stays diverse.

For additional insights, announcements, and perspectives, visit the conversation on Business Education.