Pathways Pre-Incubator Is Looking For New Members — Apply by 21 September & Earn 5 Credits!
Applications for Pathways, the University of Helsinki’s early-stage entrepreneurship programme, are open until 21 September. The programme runs from 3 October to 7 December 2026, and Bachelor’s, Master’s and Doctoral students can earn 5 ECTS.
“Entrepreneurship” can sometimes make it sound as if everyone is expected to arrive with a startup, a pitch deck and a suspiciously detailed five-year plan. That isn’t really the idea behind Pathways.
A consultancy is an idea. So is an association, a community, a new way of doing something, or simply a problem you keep thinking about.
Pathways is designed for students and researchers who want to explore what could happen if they take an idea seriously for a while. You don’t need a finished business concept, previous entrepreneurial experience or even a clear idea of where you want to end up.
From ideas to something you can actually test
Over the course of the programme, participants have worked on everything from an independent magazine subscription and a tool for learning Finnish to a community for talking about death, a new approach to preventive pet care and a digital recycling platform adapting Finland’s deposit-return system for the East African market.
The ideas are different. The question is much the same: could this become something useful, and what would it take to find out?
Pathways gives participants the time, structure and tools to explore that question. The programme covers practical aspects of developing an idea, including understanding your users and market, testing and validating your concept, developing a business model, and communicating your idea to others.
There is also the part that tends to matter when an idea starts moving beyond the notebook: funding. Participants learn how to identify potential funding opportunities, think about what makes a project fundable and explain their idea clearly enough for someone else to understand why it is worth supporting.
Alongside funding and pitching, the programme looks at topics such as building a community, intellectual property and taking an idea from an early concept towards its next concrete step.
You don’t have to know where it is going
Not every Pathways project needs to become a company. Some ideas may turn into businesses; others may become research projects, associations, services or something that did not quite exist before.
And some may simply help you realise that entrepreneurship is, or isn’t, something you want to pursue.
That is part of the point.
The programme brings together around 40 teams from across the University of Helsinki’s campuses, creating a community where participants can develop their own projects while learning from people working on very different ones.
The final Pathways of the year
The next Pathways programme runs 3 October–7 December 2026. This will be the last Pathways programme of the year.
Bachelor’s, Master’s and Doctoral students can earn 5 ECTS for completing the programme.
If there is an idea you have been thinking about, or if you are simply curious to find out whether you have one — applications are open until 21 September 2026.