05-06-2025
At the Daniels School of Business, the phrase “integrating business and STEM” isn’t a slogan — it’s our strategic north star. As someone who’s spent time in boardrooms at McKinsey, built companies in venture studios and now teaches the next generation of changemakers, I’ve come to see that the future of work lives squarely at the intersection of business fluency and technological confidence.
This isn’t a distant future. It’s already here. And at the Daniels School, we’re preparing students to lead it.
Too often, business and STEM are treated as parallel tracks — complementary, but separate. Here, we embrace STEM as a fundamental driver of value creation and transformation. We design programs and experiences where students must navigate both realms simultaneously. Our business education is infused with analytics, AI and digital transformation as core courses. We expect students to apply STEM tools to solve business challenges, and we support them with partnerships across Purdue’s world-class colleges of engineering, science and agriculture.
We see this integration in action every day, whether it’s a student team working with a CPG company on the business case for automation, or another building a go-to-market and product strategy for an ed-tech product. The point isn’t just technical competency — it’s interdisciplinary fluency.
In the coming job market, many descriptions could be reduced to a single line: “tech-enabled complex problem-solving to create value.” That value might come from building a new product, redesigning an internal process, or leading a team of engineers and marketers toward a shared vision. With the technical barriers to solution building rapidly falling, innovation requires leaders who can apply integrative problem-solving that transcends disciplines. They need mastery as communicators, including storytelling and relationship-building. They need to acquire domain expertise.
We’re forming students who are experts in their domain, deeply understand workflows, anticipate unmet needs and identify problem spaces. To lead, they need fluency in building and working with software, information, knowledge and data to experiment and test solutions.
I’ve watched this evolution from multiple vantage points — helping Fortune 500s digitize operations, co-founding ventures in SaaS and AI, and now building curriculum for programs like the Daniels School’s Integrated Business and Engineering (IBE) and Venture X, a new three-course series in collaboration with the John Martinson Honors College. The patterns are clear: businesses need talent that can connect dots across disciplines, lead diverse teams, and move with speed and discernment in uncertain environments.
Students who embrace interdisciplinary learning position themselves for the roles of the future: product managers, innovation leaders, transformation executives and venture builders. These aren’t “business-only” or “tech-only” jobs. They demand a hybrid mindset: strategic thinking, tech fluency, emotional intelligence and strong storytelling.
At the Daniels School, we focus on profound integration, helping students develop this mindset through an incredible array of experiential and interdisciplinary opportunities, including student clubs, case competitions, concept competitions, working groups and learning communities. The challenge isn’t finding opportunities; it’s learning to prioritize.
Programs like IBE place students in real-world scenarios where they analyze automation impacts, test product strategies, and make critical decisions based on both technical feasibility and customer insights. By the time they graduate, our students aren’t just ready — they’re seasoned.
In Venture X, students work in interdisciplinary teams across majors, working on their passion, exploring problem spaces, prototyping solutions and preparing their ventures for real-world launch. From funding to mentorship, the support is real because the learning is real.
We’re also exploring corporate venturing programs, mimicking the constraints and challenges of innovating inside large organizations, and a venture studio right here at the Daniels School, empowering students to experience the full lifecycle of innovation: from napkin sketch to market traction. We provide immersive, practical experiences to develop adaptable, confident, tech-savvy leaders who can leverage technology to address challenges.
Why venture as a platform? The focus on integrated problem-solving builds confidence to tackle challenges head-on, helping students pave their way to product and technical leadership. It provides countless opportunities for mastering the tools, mindsets, skills and strategies that will define the future of work and innovation.
We aren’t reacting to trends in business education — we’re setting them. The Daniels School is reimagining what a future-ready business school should look like. We’ve launched cutting-edge programs like IBE and the Master of Business and Technology (MBT). We’ve doubled down on industry collaboration, tech integration and high-impact learning. And we’re just getting started.
Business is evolving. So are the roles, the skills and the expectations. At Purdue's business school, we’re not just preparing students for that future — we’re inviting them to help create it.
Kostas Grigoriou is a visiting assistant professor in Strategic Management. He leads Venture X, a new innovative program for hands-on venture creation, and works with Integrated Business and Engineering students on their seminars and capstone projects. He is designing integrated learning opportunities for Purdue students to prepare them for product and technical leadership in the future of work and innovation. Former academic, strategy consultant, entrepreneur, and venture studio director, Grigoriou has extensive experience in building and funding new ventures with founders, corporations, and universities. His mission is to inspire the next generation of dreamers to develop entrepreneurial confidence.
