What exactly is this global venture lab?

Global Venture Lab (GVL) is a university based business creation platform. It is powered by a globally connected faculty, students, and alumni of business competence: A community of individuals passionate about growth venturing for problems worth solving. The mission is to produce “masters of the art” and the needed scientific knowledge. To achieve this, entrepreneurs are invited over to open their businesses for co-creation, as Live Cases, via action research and action learning programs.

GVL builds a “new faculty”, a team based faculty for a new science, “commercialization science”. This is creating a dedicated voluntary partnership of humanists, scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists. The three founders of GVL are an “engineer-innovator” from University of California (UC Berkeley), a “serial technopreneur” from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT Kharagpur) and a “venture knowledgist” from University Alliance Finland (JYU).

In Finland, GVL is a University Alliance Finland Research Cluster of Excellence. The home base comprises Tampere U. of Technology (TUT), U. of Jyväskylä (JYU) and U. of Tampere (UTA) – Finland’s largest university entity. The team has a presence in Helsinki, Jyväskylä, and Tampere plus strong connections to Lappeenranta U. of Technology, U. of Oulu and Åbo Akademi U. of Turku. With an unusual blend of committed individuals, in each of the founding locations, GVL is set to match the knowledge of academicians, the capacity of students, and the competence of practitioners for a great cocktail – resulting in co-creation of new masters, new knowledge, and new businesses, if not industries, solving big problems.

Vision 2011

Inspired by the phenomenal success of one of the first portfolio companies, in creating wealth and helping solve a big global problem – topped by the PhD thesis turning it also into a huge new cornerstone of the V2C paradigm – GVL produces “masters of the art” by partnering teams in 12 different countries on 5 continents. The community manages knowledge funds at each location and runs a combined portfolio of over 100 growth ventures. The study programs are increasingly based on systemic student group rotation between continents. The alumni are actively involved in building the next generation of both masters and businesses.  


Who's behind GVL?