How far does an entrepreneurial head start go?

Every year, thousands of students at the University of Auckland take a step outside their degrees and into entrepreneurship through free programmes, events and workshops delivered by the Business School’s Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE). They enter the Velocity Challenge, join Summer Lab, use the makerspace or participate in one of more than twenty other programmes. Others spend months building ventures or volunteering on Velocity’s student-led committees.

They come out changed. At least, that’s what many of them say. But what happens after the final pitch? Do these students go on to create start-ups, earn more, or build careers in innovation-rich industries?

That’s the question CIE set out to answer with data rather than just anecdotal stories of its graduates’ successes.

Measuring impact, one student at a time

CIE’s mission is to equip students with mindsets, networks, and capabilities that extend far beyond campus. But to know whether its programmes are achieving that goal, the Centre needed to trace what happens after students graduate, and to do so rigorously.

“We believe in the value of entrepreneurship education and extracurricular programming,” says Professor Rod McNaughton, Academic Director of CIE. “But belief isn’t enough. This project was about understanding, with evidence, what actually changes for students who engage with our programmes.”

The research was led by Rae Rho, then a PhD student in economics, who recently graduated, and was supervised by Dr Simona Fabrizi. Working with CIE and Statistics NZ, the team embarked on a year-long journey to prepare the data, navigate privacy and ethics approvals, and gain access to Statistics New Zealand’s Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI), one of New Zealand’s most powerful but tightly controlled research tools.

The IDI brings together anonymised data from across government, including education, tax, immigration, and Census records. Researchers can use it to follow individuals’ outcomes over time, while ensuring privacy. The application process is rigorous, and linking institutional data to the IDI requires detailed permissions and legal safeguards.

From participation to comparison

Once approved, the research team uploaded participation data from CIE programmes, covering students from 2015 through late 2022. Using national student IDs, these records were matched with administrative data in the IDI, which enabled a side-by-side comparison of graduates who had and hadn’t participated in CIE initiatives.

The matched dataset of around 12,000 individuals allowed the team to explore differences in graduate outcomes using variables such as degree completion, employment status, weekly hours worked, industry and occupation classifications, income from a range of sources, and patterns of international mobility. Where possible, they also examined indicators related to self-employment and business ownership.

The resulting sample was carefully balanced, ensuring that participants and non-participants were matched on qualification type, field of study, and graduation year. This created a solid basis for comparing outcomes across the two groups.

Some differences but no dramatic divergences

The study found that CIE participants had a slightly higher degree completion rate than non-participants and were marginally more likely to report being in employment at the time of the 2018 Census. They were also slightly more concentrated in the “Professional, Scientific and Technical Services” sector, a field often associated with knowledge-intensive and innovation-focused roles.

“Differences in self-employment rates were small - 2.1% vs 1.8% - and only a tiny fraction of either group reported being employers”, said Rho, who conducted the analysis. “Income comparisons showed no consistent patterns, with earnings fluctuating across years and qualification levels.”

One important limitation: the dataset could not track what happened to students who moved overseas. “That’s a real blind spot,” said Rho. “We know that many entrepreneurial graduates pursue global careers, but once they leave New Zealand, they vanish from the data.”

Many of CIE’s alumni make their mark on the global stage, such as Alex Kendall, the founder of Wayve, or Bowen Pan, who helped create Facebook Marketplace, so exploring how to reliably track international alumni is a key area for future research.

Not all participants are equal: the intensity effect

The national-level data may not have shown strong differences, but CIE’s own records pointed to a compelling insight: students’ engagement levels varied dramatically. While some attended a single event, others devoted hundreds of hours across multiple programmes. The median student spent 220 hours in CIE activities, with the top quartile exceeding 389 hours. A few logged more than 1,500 hours.

Some of the most time-intensive programmes included Summer Lab and the Velocity $100k Challenge. These experiences offered sustained involvement over weeks or months and involved more intensive mentoring, teamwork, and venture development.

Linking the outcomes data to participation hours is yet to be done, but this is an area CIE hopes to explore further as part of its ongoing evaluations.

“Engagement depth may be more important than breadth,” said Darsel Keane, Director of the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. “We know anecdotally that those who really lean into CIE’s offerings have the tenacity to stick with entrepreneurship, or revisit entrepreneurship later in their career journey. That’s not something national datasets capture easily, but we try to track it internally.”

Data quality and the need for longer timeframes

The research also highlighted challenges with uneven coverage. While income and employment records had excellent match rates, many of the survey-based sources covering wellbeing, household wealth, or business ownership had very limited data for this group.

The study’s timeframe, limited to participants from 2015 onward, was another constraint. “It may simply be too soon to see large effects,” said McNaughton. “Entrepreneurial careers often take time to emerge. When the university surveyed its alumni, it found that 26% had founded businesses and that their company’s five-year survival rate was more than double the New Zealand average.”

Nonetheless, the study showed that even with limited data, it is possible to construct a careful, defensible evaluation of an educational intervention. And the process revealed valuable lessons not just about the outcomes of CIE’s programmes, but about how universities can better track, understand, and learn from the experiences of their students.

A model for learning, not just proof

While the findings didn’t yield dramatic confirmation that CIE programmes produce higher incomes or more self-employment, they offered something equally important: a starting point for better questions.

“This was always about more than proving impact,” said Keane. “It’s about building an evidence base, understanding the diversity of our students’ experiences, and learning how to make our programmes more effective over time. The importance of depth of engagement, for example, has implications for programme length and possibly including more entrepreneurship opportunities in the curriculum.”

CIE plans to continue tracking alumni using LinkedIn, Crunchbase, Pitchbook and other data sources, and collaborate with researchers working on similar evaluations. The study has also underscored the need for consistent definitions and greater coordination in measuring entrepreneurship outcomes, a challenge many universities and economies face globally.

“Entrepreneurship education is about developing a mindset and competencies for the long run,” said McNaughton. “You don’t always see the return right away. But if we can follow our students further, and understand what makes the biggest difference, we can design better, more inclusive, and more impactful experiences.”