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What develops a student’s capacity for systems leadership?
In 2023, a team of Wesleyan University first-year students placed first out of nine hundred entries worldwide in the University of Oxford’s Map the System (an international competition that asks students to research a complex social or environmental issue). The following year, another team of Wesleyan first-years won again, against more than 130 teams from 17 countries. Wesleyan is the first institution in the competition’s history to win twice, both times through the Patricelli Center for Entrepreneurship, which I direct.
Universities have often measured entrepreneurial success by the number of venture-backed companies their students create. PitchBook’s annual university rankings, for example, measure programs by the number of venture-backed founders they produce (which tends to favor schools like UC Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, and Harvard, with large graduate programs and proximity to venture capital). But none of the Wesleyan students I advised pitched a startup. None of them raised capital. None of them built an app. They produced systems analyses and were judged by panels of practitioners and academics to have done it better than teams from hundreds of other universities worldwide, many competing at the graduate level.
There is, of course, nothing wrong with a venture-backed startup. Many of our students will build companies, some at significant scale, and the Center invests seriously in those who do. The Patricelli Center for Entrepreneurship changed its name from the Patricelli Center for Social Entrepreneurship, an expansion of our mandate, because, as Bob Patricelli put it at our rededication, “The scale of change on all fronts now demands that we prepare constructive leaders and institution builders in all sectors—business, nonprofits, government, and beyond.”
We believe, however, that if the measure of success for an undergraduate entrepreneurship center is the production of unicorns, then it will be an ecosystem optimized for that specific output, not primarily an undergraduate entrepreneurship program. Instead, we seek to form leaders who can examine their own positionality, deeply understand the systems they want to change, and engage with power (and not just critique it). By the unicorn measure, a student who never starts a company but goes on to reshape a public agency, lead a community organization, or change how a corporation treats its workers is invisible. The frame we use to measure entrepreneurial success must be broader.
Teaching Power
As one of the highest expressions of personal agency, entrepreneurship is inextricable from power. It has always been about power. The work is to teach our students to engage it. In Power for All, Julie Battilana and Tiziana Casciaro argue that power is not under the unique ownership of a few, but rather a dynamic that anyone can learn to identify, navigate, and build. But while entrepreneurship education teaches students to generate ideas, test them, and pitch the results, it has rarely prepared them to understand the distribution of power that may impact the ventures they hope to build (much less how they define their relationship to it).
That is a core deficit. Students receiving an entrepreneurial education should be well versed in how power manifests, persists, who holds it, and how it evolves. They must be equally capable of defining their own relationship to it: whether engaging it from the outside, building it from within, or both at once.
Three practices make that possible: exposure, experimentation, and activation. Exposure features direct, sustained encounters with leaders who have engaged power across sectors, disciplines, and life circumstances, often beyond the conventional entrepreneurial path. Then, students must have real resources and structured space to experiment with their leadership capacity, asking tough questions like, how does power manifest in my daily life? My career plan? Finally, students can choose how or whether they want to activate this capacity. In this way, the pitch deck and business plan become tools for this process, rather than the goal from the beginning.
Three years ago, we launched a course around this process, with a simple premise: 18 case studies—built for the course from tens of hours of interviews—paired with weekly exercises around power, storytelling, and leadership. Each week students study a leader’s lived experience, and then they interview that leader as a collective.
Nearly half of the 27 leaders who have visited the course are Wesleyan alumni, creating a multigenerational network of practitioners, who have led in unconventional ways, brought into direct contact with students still figuring out what their own leadership might look like. I have worked to connect students with visionaries in a variety of sectors like UN global communications, network television, refugee resettlement, venture capital, climate investing, hip-hop and ballet, museum curation, and diplomacy, among others. Power operates across all these spaces, and learning to engage with it requires encounters across contexts. The leaders are a constellation of the many ways a person can identify a problem and wield and mobilize power to find its solution. For example, Rashida Jones, former president of MSNBC and the first Black woman to lead a major cable news network, modeled what it looks like to build trust inside a complex system, and to set records doing it. Melissa Fleming, the UN’s Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications, showed students what it means to shape public narrative around the largest refugee crisis since World War II. The late Marc Pachter, former director of the National Portrait Gallery, shared how he saved one of the most important artworks in American history—the Lansdowne Portrait of George Washington—from being sold. Each case study is a different roadmap for students to engage with power, push back against it, or incorporate it into their lives.
The exposure, experimentation, and activation doesn’t always offer a clear route to attracting venture funding. But at their best, they produce something harder to measure: a student who knows which problem is theirs, why it is theirs, and what they are prepared to do about it.
The Path Forward
When the 2025 team began their project on the water crisis in Jakarta, the obvious frame was scarcity: a megacity sinking, millions without clean water. Through months of conversation with residents, researchers, and policy leaders, they discovered that it was a dual crisis: subsidence driven by groundwater extraction (by those who could afford private wells) was experienced simultaneously with infrastructural failure that left poorer residents dependent on that same extraction. That insight only emerged from sustained engagement with a problem that, from a distance, looked like one thing, but was in fact two things in tension and contradiction.
The problem was never water scarcity as a single challenge; it was all about how water was distributed and produced, and the power structures which kept the inequality in place across centuries.
The 2023 team’s analysis of child marriage did the same kind of entrepreneurial work: the kind that requires deep systems understanding, honest engagement with power, and the standing to make a claim about what is actually happening.
Priyanshu Pokhrel ’26 arrived at Wesleyan, for example, already knowing which problem was hers—menstrual stigma in Nepal, where cultural restrictions on women during menstruation shape daily life. The most extreme form of those restrictions, chaupadi, confines girls to outdoor huts during their periods.
In the summer of 2023, Pokhrel and her co-founder spent more than a week conducting field interviews with teachers, local health workers, and government officials in the Syangja district. They found that the Nepalese government had already mandated free menstrual pads for every public school in the country, but also that the policy lacked proper implementation, such that pads sat in back rooms, unused and deteriorating. Years earlier, the national curriculum had been stripped of health education entirely.
Pyari, the company Pokhrel built from that experience—works to address this gap, designed from the specific context of the community it enters: from the language and the relationships that already exist to the local power dynamics. These dynamics are often complicated by competing stakeholders, so Pokhrel and her team studied power structures in place, building trust by incorporating local expertise into programming.
Pokhrel often speaks of a boy in one of her workshops who wrote a poem about his mother and about the worry he carried every time her period meant she had to leave the house. In its first seven months, Pyari reached more than 1,700 people directly and 60 million online. Pokhrel received a $10,000 Davis Projects for Peace Prize and a $6,000 New Venture Award from the Patricelli Center. She graduated this year.
Read more stories by Ahmed M. Badr.