In education administration, the challenge is to balance accountability with the constant need to develop and improve services. An entrepreneurial mindset, including embracing creativity, curiosity, and resilience, offers a way to innovate without losing efficiency and allows administrators to create services that are both effective and future focused.
The entrepreneurial mindset
Education administration involves many different types of services for students, companies, alumni, staff members, and more. With this comes public funding that requires accountability in how money is spent, along with an expectation of efficiency. The balance between continual service development and accountability requires a mindset that is willing to learn new things and try new approaches. This is the very definition of a growth mindset.
Carol Dweck (2006) first popularised the concept of the growth mindset in her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Dweck noticed that the students she worked with could be divided into two distinct groups of self-belief. She labelled these two groups: fixed mindset and growth mindset. Fixed mindset students believed intelligence was innate, while growth mindset students believed they could improve through effort and learning. It is rooted in the belief that most things are learnable with time and effort. This helps in all kinds of ways, such as the dreams you have for yourself, the effort you are willing to dedicate to a difficult task, and the expectations you will have of yourself, and others close to you.
In previous writings, I have set out the core components of the entrepreneurial mindset (e.g. Spokes 2024). The entrepreneurial mindset builds on the growth mindset, encompassing qualities such as:
- valuing and enhancing creativity
- increased tolerance of uncertainty
- a higher willingness to take risks
- being intrinsically motivated through curiosity
- a willingness to accept failure as not only a valid outcome but viewing it as a learning experience.
This package of behaviours and attitudes is what will propel individuals and teams forward to take on the challenges of the future. The best thing about this mindset is that it is entirely learnable (Lynch and Corbett 2021). We no longer believe that some people are born with these skills, and some are not. Through specific and careful teaching and learning methods, these skills are learnable and measurable.
The entrepreneurial mindset extends the growth mindset from the individual to the organisational level, making creativity, curiosity and resilience part of how teams work—not just how individuals think.
Why do we need it in university administration?
An entrepreneurial mindset is a valuable foundation for fully utilising service design. To fully engage with service design, and reap the benefits of it, you must be willing to start without knowing the outcome; a need to tolerate uncertainty and to be motivated through curiosity. This lack of knowing is referred to as the fuzzy front end (Reinertsen 1998). If you embark on a service design project with a specific solution in mind, you have already missed the point of service design, and no number of tools and methods will help you create valuable services. One of the main philosophies of service design is to “love the problem, not the solution”. This means that by focusing on the problem and really addressing the problem, you will find the right outcome. Fixating too early on a specific solution can lead to outcomes that don’t actually address the real problem.
Inherently, in service design, you need to be willing to be proven wrong in your assumptions and you need to be willing to “fail”. That failure gets you one step closer to a solution that will work.
Consider how a child learns to walk. They are engaging this ‘failure, move forward’, or fail forward process that will yield the best results. You can see this process naturally happen every day when a child starts to walk. They constantly experiment with different approaches to this unfamiliar concept of walking until they find one that works for them (Adolph et al. 2012). They cannot know how others do it, but they try and try (and fail and fail) until they succeed. The process is not the same for every child. Different paths to walking exist. They gradually build their internal knowledge of what works and what doesn’t. I see this as the same process it takes to employ the entrepreneurial mindset. In a child we don’t call this failure; we call it learning. I believe that the actions of a small child, when learning something new like walking, reflect the core components of the entrepreneurial mindset that I presented earlier in this article:
- Valuing and enhancing creativity: Have you seen some of the creative ways babies move themselves around a room?
- Increased tolerance of uncertainty: They are brave enough to try all kinds of things that they have no idea about the outcome.
- A higher willingness to take risks: Letting go of the table without a second thought.
- An open mind to learning new things: Immediately getting up and trying without overthinking.
- Intrinsically motivated and curious: If they can reach new things to touch and explore, they will try almost anything.
- A willingness to accept failure: Babies fail 99 times out of 100 at the beginning but with practice, this failure ratio declines rapidly.
Babies embody the entrepreneurial approach in almost everything that they do because that is how they learn. Children are natural learners. Sir Ken Robinson talks about this natural learning process and the systems that they enter into when they go to school in his 2013 TEDTalk titled How to escape education’s death valley. Robinson lists three core conditions for humans to flourish: diversity, curiosity, and creativity. He then explains how education systems are set up in contradiction of these. This is done to deliver education at scale but knowing that these systems do not support diversity, curiosity, and creativity. (Robinson 2013.)
We have all been through these educations systems and many of us continue to work in them. It is very important for educational institutions to reinforce the core principles mentioned by Robinson to promote fearless experimentation into their culture if they want to address real problems. This also includes the problems that we tackle on a daily basis in university administration. Each administrator needs to continuously develop services that genuinely meet evolving needs. These tasks require an entrepreneurial mindset.
Obstacles to applying the entrepreneurial mindset
Being able to embody and apply an entrepreneurial mindset isn’t an easy task. It takes willingness, courage, and freedom: the willingness to do something different than would normally be done which means that you may stick out in most environments. To be willing to stick out, you need to have the courage to do that. It can be difficult for humans, who are communal animals and who generally seek peer approval, to do something in a way that is different. In addition, one must have the ability or the freedom within the structure to attempt to do things in a manner that is different than expected.
Service design and organisational constraints
In service design, curiosity helps us to identify real problems and filter out distractions. In doing this, we can create real solutions that add value immediately (Lawrence 2025). Embodying this mindset makes it easier to accept that failure is a part of the learning process for yourself and your team which creates a safe space for risk-taking. Remember, when a baby doesn’t learn to walk on their first try, they don’t shrug and think “well, that was a failure, we won’t be trying that again.” It is important for adults to also not expect perfection or close to perfection on the first time out. Requiring perfection or even successful ‘launches’ the first time doing something is very normal in most organisational structures. Failure can result in demotion, termination, or humiliation. These serve as great barriers to trying new things and iteration.
Prototyping and testing are essential tools for minimising costs and maximising value creation (Laloo and De Keyser n.d.). If you can make prototyping and testing a natural part of your working experience, people will be more willing to take risks to meet challenges in new and dynamic ways. This is the difference between deep understanding and rote memorisation. Only true understanding enables flexible application in new contexts. However, prototyping and testing are not always easily embraced in organisations where success is measured through rigid key performance indicators (KPIs) such as numbers of companies started by students, number of graduating students, or number of new markets opened for international applications. When KPIs reward perfection or penalise failure, teams are less likely to take the risks to support innovation and the entrepreneurial approach.
The challenge of key performance indicators
This brings us back to the challenge of KPIs in large and often siloed organisations where they can inadvertently hinder entrepreneurial thinking. KPIs are a reality of most people’s working lives. And as the saying goes, you get what you measure. Unfortunately, if you set your KPIs or metrics on the wrong things, then sometimes the incentive to do the wrong thing is valued more than doing the right thing. This is misguided at best and counterproductive at worst. And yet it happens repeatedly. It is particularly acute in larger organisations where one unit’s KPIs may directly conflict with what needs to happen in another part of the organisation.
A good example in university administration is enquiries from potential students. It is possible that the institution’s marketing department is measured by how many enquiries they generate. But the admissions department is measured on how many of those enquiries lead to applications. It can be easy to generate enquiries. It is more difficult to generate enquiries that will go on to apply. In this situation you can end up with one department generating a massive number of enquiries, thus exceeding their KPIs but then the other department does not meet theirs because the individuals who submitted enquiries were not necessarily qualified to apply. You get what you measure.
There needs to be flexibility in the KPIs that are allocated to some degree and there also needs to be an acceptance that you cannot always measure the thing that you are wanting to improve. This tension also raises questions about how we evaluate success. How can we harmonise and make sense of KPIs across the journey of staff and students? It also questions whether those things which are easily measurable are the only things worth improving. In addition to compatible KPIs across the organisation, what if the goal we need to pursue is to for example have students feel valued, how can that be measured? Can that be part of your KPIs? Maybe. This is just one example of many points that matter that are not easily measured or measurable.
How can the entrepreneurial approach be supported?
I already mentioned a few ideas on how the entrepreneurial approach can be supported above, such as making sure there are not contradictory KPIs, letting research precede solutions, and leading with curiosity; but it is also about atmosphere and encouragement. For anyone to try something new, they need to have a safe space to try, there needs to be a culture that embraces openness to learning and a willingness to be wrong. And more importantly, there needs to be a willingness to be seen as being wrong—at all levels.
Sharing failures is a great way to encourage trying and solidifying a safe space. Finland has been trying to do this for some years celebrating Failure Day on 13 October. Failure Day was first celebrated in 2010 by students who realised that Finland’s national character of risk-aversion and fear of inadequacy was holding the nation back from what the economy needed, namely more entrepreneurs (Yle News 2013; Simas 2025) But these skills go beyond just being needed to become an entrepreneur. They are needed in every workplace in the education sector.
Thorough research helps reduce the likelihood of failure. When user research is done sufficiently, the ideas that need testing will become much more defined and precise. This means that prototyping and testing become inherently less risky than if you just used informed assumptions and started from there. So, by doing the research, you are reducing unnecessary risk and can minimise costs. And by improving services in a targeted way using service design, you are eliminating waste of time and human resources, as well as actual financial costs (Laloo and De Keyser n.d.).
In the education context, this means talking directly with students, staff, related external companies and other public services before any solutions start to be formed. Once their needs and views are researched, there needs to be simple prototypes built to make sure that their needs were understood and addressed in the right way. Using this process, even in education, allows for learning (which is no longer considered failure) through prototyping and testing along the way.
The organisational culture is best served when it removes the unreasonable expectation that a service will be perfect the first time it is launched and giving room for learning and iteration. This needs to come from the top of the organisation and will result in a much more robust and valuable service in the end. It also gives teams the breathing room to not be perfect which could result in services that are not fit for purpose (but kept because of sunk cost) or the team ending up paralysed with what to do next. Employing an entrepreneurial approach and using service design allows for a culture of prototyping and testing that leads to the evolution of services that can also address future needs and not only current ones (Galway Business School 2025).
Culture, creativity, and adaptability
To truly develop an entrepreneurial mindset within education administration, institutions must align their culture, structures, and metrics with learning, experimentation, creativity, and adaptability. This requires moving away from rigid KPIs that discourage experimentation and toward an environment that values iteration and evidence-based development. By normalising research, testing, and even failure as essential parts of growth, universities and education administrators can build services that are both innovative and accountable.
Ultimately, an entrepreneurial mindset allows education administrators to do what higher education asks of students every day: to keep learning, keep experimenting, and keep striving for better solutions. By doing this, we can create systems that aren’t just efficient for today but are adaptable for tomorrow as well. Embedding an entrepreneurial mindset into education administration is not a luxury, it is a necessity for relevance and resilience for the future.
References
Adolph, K. E., Cole, W. G., Komati, M., Garciaguirre, J. S., Badaly, D., Lingeman, J. M., Chan, G. L., & Sotsky, R. B. 2012. How do you learn to walk? Thousands of steps and dozens of falls per day. Psychological Science, 23 (11), 1387–394.
Burghardt, L.C. & Wallace, J.B. 2025. Mattering in early childhood: Building a strong foundation for life. (pdf) Center on the Developing Child. White Paper. Published 3 November 2025. Harvard University: Center on the Developing Child. Accessed 22 December 2025.
Dweck, C. S. 2006. Mindset: The new psychology of success. New York: Random House.
Galway Business School 2025. The Entrepreneurial Mindset: Cultivating Innovation and Creativity. Innovation and Development blog. Published 7 February 2025. Accessed 20 November 2025.
Laloo, H. and De Keyser, A. n.d. How Prototyping Helps You Reach Your Goals? The Product Architects blog. Accessed 20 November 2025.
Lawrence, A. 2025. Service Design solves the right problem. In Newton, R., Mutton, J. and Doherty, M. (eds.) Transforming higher education with human-centred design. New York, NY: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
Lynch, M. P. and Corbett, A. C. 2021. Entrepreneurial mindset shift and the role of cycles of learning. Journal of Small Business Management 61 (1), 80–101.
OECD 2015. The Innovation Imperative: Contributing to Productivity, Growth and Well-Being. Paris: OECD Publishing.
Reinertsen, D. G. 1999. Taking the Fuzziness Out of the Fuzzy Front End. Research-Technology Management 42 (6), 25–31.
Robinson, K. 2013. How to escape education’s death valley (Youtube video). TED Conference. Published 10 May 2013. Accessed 22 December 2025.
Simas, K. 2025. Did You Know… Finland Celebrates a National Day for Failure? Medium blog. Medium. Published 7July 2025. Accessed 22 December 2025.
Spokes, P. 2024. Developing Employee Intrapreneurship. Tikissä blog of Metropolia UAS 13 February 2024. Helsinki: Metropolia University of Applied Sciences. Accessed 18 November 2025.
Tierney, A. L. & Nelson, C. A. 2009. Brain Development and the Role of Experience in the Early Years. November 1;30 (2), 9–13. PMID: 23894221; PMCID: PMC3722610.
Yle News 2013. Finns celebrate International Failure Day. Published 13 October 2013. Yle. Accessed 20 November 2025.
Author
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Pamela Spokes
Specialist, TurbiiniPamela Spokes BA, MA, MBA, AmO. Educator in Service Design and Entrepreneurship with the Turbiini Pre-Incubator Programme in English.
About the author
