Values for the future

What does it mean to be a university for the future and for the future makers? As we embrace the new strategy of Haaga-Helia with its revised set of values, our work is guided by four core values: courage, curiosity, collaboration, and caring. These are not just words—they reflect the mindset of a generation reshaping education, work, and society. GenZ students, born 1997–2012, are committed to making a difference (Deloitte 2025).

In this article, we explore how these values resonate with their hopes for learning and life, and how they shape a university experience that is meaningful, inclusive, and future-ready.

Courage – learning and acting in an uncertain world

Courage means stepping outside the comfort zone. It is about asking difficult questions, recognising potential risks, and taking responsibility for shaping the future. According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report (2025), 70 percent of today’s students will work in roles that do not yet exist. It means that we need to provide them with adaptable competencies that can be applied across diverse contexts.

GenZ has been called the anxious generation (Haidt 2025). GenZ representatives or Zoomers are less likely to have children, cars, own homes or a steady career, due to the uncertain times, climate change and the constant change they are faced with. Yet, they are not afraid to show up. GenZ just had its first revolution in Nepal, overturning the government and using social media to vote for a new prime minister online (Harvey 2025). Many other destinations around the world, e.g., Madagascar, Kenya, Bangladesh, Peru and Morocco (Mortenson 2025) have had their taste of protests led by GenZ. They are certainly cabable of courage and speaking ouf for the causes they believe in (EY 2021).

To prepare GenZ students for an unpredictable future, universities must prioritise building their capacity to navigate uncertainty and make sound, ethical decisions. In practice, this means designing courses and creating projects around real-world challenges, for example environmental, social, or technological. It means rethinking assessment to value the learning process, experimentation, and reflection alongside outcomes. And it means fostering an environment where mistakes are treated as valuable learning experiences rather than failures.

Haaga-Helia has a special place for students who want to experiment and explore the opportunities of entrepreneurship. The StartUp School gives students a space to take entrepreneurial risks while still studying: to try out business ideas, get coaching, integrate entrepreneurship into their studies, and access a a network of like-minded peers and professionals. The Pre-Incubator Program allows learners to develop business ideas, test them with customer interviews, and refine them. This supports students who may not have strong entrepreneurial backgrounds but are willing to try. Such courses lower the barrier to taking unconventional career paths.

Curiosity – fueling lifelong learning and innovation

Curiosity forms the foundation of lifelong learning, which in a rapidly changing world, matters now more than ever. The OECD’s Skills Outlook (2023) identifies lifelong learning and meta-skills such as critical thinking and learning-to-learn as essential for future employability. Also, the World Economic Forum (2025) highlights lifelong learning and curiosity as the core skills expected to grow in importance by 2030. In other words, curiosity is not just a nice-to-have trait, it is a strategic capability for thriving when knowledge and technologies evolve faster than any curriculum can keep up to.

Therefore, our role as a higher educational institution is to nurture students’ natural curiosity rather than confine it within rigid course boundaries. This means creating space for interdisciplinary learning that encourages exploration across subjects, designing short cross-disciplinary projects where curiosity drives discovery, and embedding research-based learning from the earliest stages of study.

Haaga-Helia actively supports curiosity and lifelong learning through dedicated research and innovative pedagogical approaches. Our Pedagogy and learning research area explores continuous learning, guidance practices, and the impact of digitalisation and AI on education, while developing micro-credentials and personalised learning tools. Haaga-Helia’s pedagogical vision is based on dynamic competence, which means that it evolves with the latest research.

Experiential learning methods, e.g., hackathons or service design tools, push students to tackle business challenges and real-world complexity through interdisciplinary, iterative problem-solving with the industry and blended programmes create multicultural learning environments that expose students to diverse perspectives. Also, flexible pathways including recognition of prior learning allow students to integrate work experience and self-directed exploration into their degrees, removing barriers to curiosity-driven learning. A lot of learning takes place beyond the classroom, when taking part in study tours or while on international exchange.

Collaboration – building futures together

Collaboration is one of the core skills that are demanded by employers in the future (World Economic Forum 2025). GenZ is the ultimate digital native generation (McKinsey & Company 2024). They are used to sharing ideas and following trends set by influencers around the globe. They are ready to embrace the digital solutions that make them more connected with others. In their studies, they get used to working with their peers in person as well. Much of learning is based on projects and large activities that are conducted in collaboration with other students, supervisors and businesses. They learn important skills for the future of work and increase their employability.

Thanks to Haaga-Helia’s international profile, our students learn to collaborate with people from different backgrounds during their studies. They are also encouraged to use artificial intelligence and explore opportunities for human-machine collaboration. According to the World Economic Forum (2025), human-tech collaboration is expected to increase by 2030. Students must highlight their human qualities for collaboration with machines as future work will be a partnership between people and AI. The good news is that collaboration can be learnt and trained at Haaga-Helia!

In our international cooperation, Haaga-Helia has a reputation of an expert on Artificial Intelligence. Indeed, we have many AI-related projects and research groups. Also within the Ulysseus European University – an alliance of eight European universities – Haaga-Helia has the Innovation Hub of Applied Artificial Intelligence for Business and Education, where AI tools are applied to practice. Innovation hubs like the Ulysseus ones bring together students, companies, and researchers to innovate and discover new approaches and applications.

Since the pandemic, digital collaboration tools like Miro, Teams and Zoom have expanded the possibilities for international collaboration immensely. Global connectness has been taken to another level altogether. Sometimes we may be more connected globally than across different degree programmes at home! There is much to learn from peers at home as well.

Caring – fostering a culture of wellbeing

Caring refers to taking issues like the wellbeing and the mental health of our students and the entire university community into account, considering sustainability and ethics in the operations as well as contributing to an inspiring learning environment and embracing empathy in leadership. In short, making the environment and learning experience more humane.

GenZ has already shown that it is the generation most concerned about sustainability, inclusivity, mental health, and work-life balance (McKinsey & Company 2024; EY 2021.) Our students expect Haaga-Helia to offer them a safe space to experiment and learn for the future. We all contribute to this end with our everyday actions. We can be caring towards each other and everyone we encounter in our daily life at Haaga-Helia.

Haaga-Helia has implemented comprehensive measures to ensure equality, safety, and inclusion across its community. The Equality and non-discrimination plan strengthens learning support and accessibility, while the Safer space policy provides a low-threshold reporting channel for harassment and discrimination based on three principles: safe to be, safe to participate, and safe to learn.

Our formal Accessibility plan addresses physical, digital, and pedagogical barriers to ensure all students can reach their potential regardless of personal characteristics or life circumstances. The various ways of collaboration also make teamwork more accessible and inclusive, allowing students in different life situations to take part in project work, where ever they are physically. Students have access to diverse wellbeing services, for example study coaches, special needs teachers, and university chaplain. The idea is that everyone is included and no one is left behind.

The new set of values are already evident across many areas at Haaga-Helia. As we fully embrace them, their impact will become even more pronounced.

Picture: Haaga-Helia