A Costa Rican University Is Teaching Entrepreneurship as a Survival Skill

Jan de Vries · 2026-09-18

### When a University Decides Entrepreneurship Isn't Optional Most universities treat entrepreneurship as a side dish. A course here, a club there, something you sample if you're curious. ULACIT in Costa Rica flipped that script, and Allan Matarrita-Chinchilla is one of the people who explains why it matters. His argument is simple: entrepreneurship isn't just about launching companies. It's a survival skill. The kind of thinking you need when your job changes, your industry shifts, or your whole career path gets rewritten overnight. That reframing is the interesting part. It takes entrepreneurship out of the "future founder" box and puts it in the hands of every student, whether they want to build a startup or not. ### What ULACIT Actually Does Differently ULACIT is a private university based in San José, Costa Rica. Instead of parking entrepreneurship in the business school, they weave it across disciplines. Students from design, engineering, and the social sciences all run into the same mindset: spot a problem, test an idea, learn from failure, adapt. A few of the practical moves that stand out: - Real projects instead of theoretical case studies, so students ship something and see what happens - Cross-faculty collaboration, which forces them to work with people who don't think like them - A heavy emphasis on iteration, because one bad attempt isn't the end of the story - Mentors from outside academia, which keeps the classroom tethered to the real world Matarrita-Chinchilla frames this as preparation for professional change, not just for founding a company. That's a big shift from how most programs talk about it. ### Why This Matters Beyond Costa Rica If you work in EU Inc news, European startup incorporation, or anything adjacent to the European innovation scene, this should feel familiar. Europe has been wrestling with the same question for years: how do you build a culture where risk-taking is normal, not exotic? Costa Rica isn't a tech powerhouse on the scale of Germany or France. But that's exactly why the ULACIT approach is worth a closer look. It suggests that entrepreneurship education doesn't require a massive ecosystem to work. It requires a university willing to treat it as core curriculum instead of an elective. > "Entrepreneurship isn't a career path. It's a way of responding to a world that keeps changing the rules." — paraphrasing Allan Matarrita-Chinchilla For European founders and policymakers obsessed with catching up to Silicon Valley, that's a useful nudge. The pipeline doesn't start with a fund. It starts with how you teach 19-year-olds to handle uncertainty. ### The Survival Skill Nobody Lists on a Resume Here's the thing about calling entrepreneurship a survival skill. It's honest. Most people won't start a company. But almost everyone will face a moment where the old playbook stops working, and the ability to improvise, test, and pivot becomes the difference between sinking and swimming. That's what ULACIT seems to be building. Not a factory for founders, but a generation of graduates who don't freeze when the ground shifts. It's a small story from a small country. But it lands with anyone paying attention to how Europe trains its own next generation of builders. Sometimes the most useful lessons arrive from places you weren't looking.