Jukka-Pekka Heikkilä

Dr. Jukka-Pekka Heikkilä is an impact-driven entrepreneurship and organization science scholar, who has mixed a wide range of disciplines and educational approaches in his work. The co-creative approach in his projects has enabled immediate practical impact, with scientific contributions to the fields such as entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship education, organizational development,  international business, HRM and future studies. 

Regarding the academic outlets, Jukka-Pekka has published in top-tier journals including Academy of Management Discoveries, Journal of World Business, Journal of Strategic Information Systems and  Environment and Planning A. The communication to the wider public includes regular keynotes and popular media writing as a columnist in the Finnish national YLE news and international media coverage in Financial Times. He is a former Academy of Finland Postdoctoral Fellow (2017-2020) and current (non-paid) affiliations include visiting scholar positions in Harvard University and Stanford University, a Newton Fellowship of the Royal Society (UK) and British Academy. 

His scholar-activist work has focused particularly on extreme settings. It has included teaching entrepreneurship in North Korea (2012 – 2017), founding Pyongyang Startup Week concept (2016) and co-founding WTSUP! Beirut platform that focused (2018-2020) on supporting equality and equal opportunities for women entrepreneurs in Lebanon. In Finland, Dr. Heikkilä’s previous work has included action-research (2016-2019) with The Shortcut initiative, that via NGO-startup modeling aims to integrate immigrants to the Finnish society with community-driven entrepreneurship education methodology. Dr. Heikkilä’s current UASM research focus is 1) to co-create new educational openings with entrepreneurs in the Amazon area and 2) build a peacebuilding-focused research and science diplomacy project.