More than 600 national and international leaders gathered to review strategic progress and discuss trends in education, health and research at the Reunión de Consejeros 2026 (Advisors Meeting), and Mathias Uhlén was one of the keynote speakers.

The 2026 edition of this meeting was hosted by Tecnológico de Monterrey, a private non-profit university system in Mexico and held at Tec´s Santa Fe campus in Mexico City.

Among the keynote speakers was HPA Director Mathias Uhlén, invited to reflect on how universities can prepare students for a future where the boundary between academic research and industry becomes much thinner.

From curiosity to impact - without losing the joy of science

Uhlén´s path, as described in the interview, did not start with a "grand plan" but with curiosity, followed by a research opportunity that shaped the rest of his career. He describes that moment simply: "I fell in love with the creative process of science."

Why "the gap" is shrinking

A central theme of the interview is that today's most impactful industry work is increasingly driven by technology and knowledge, meaning that universities and companies inevitably converge. In Sweden, Uhlén points to an intellectual property model that assigns ownership to the individual researcher (rather than the university).The article also highlights a trade-off: when individual researchers own the inventions, universities may benefit less directly from commercial success, and researchers may miss institutional support that can help navigate complex innovation pathways. Still, the reported outcome is a large-scale startup environment that reinforces the idea that academic discoveries can become real-world tools when incentives, culture and timing align.

SciLifeLab as a template for national capability

The interview revisits the origin story of SciLifeLab: a government-funded, shared resource intended to pool national strengths and give thousands of researchers access to expensive equipment and specialized expertise.

Two challenges for universities in the next decade

In the interview, Uhlén frames two pressures higher education must address:

• integrating entrepreneurship into the university mission while maintaining academic rigor, and

• dealing with how AI and large language models will reshape both research and education.

Startup lessons

Uhlén does not present entrepreneurship as a checklist. He explicitly rejects the idea that there is one formula, and emphasizes the lived reality of building: Every startup journey is unique.From there, the article distills several practical principles: expect volatility, protect survival by balancing costs and revenues, and choose a niche ambitious enough to win globally. He also warns against pulling too much bureaucracy into the earliest, most fragile phase of innovation - while acknowledging that a mature venture eventually needs structure and regulation.

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