Youth Entrepreneurship as a Resource for Future Belief

Young people in Finland are lonely, anxious about the future — and at the same time, more interested in entrepreneurship than ever before. This paradox, explored through Humak’s research and international collaboration, points toward a direction that deserves attention according to the title of this article.

Finland’s uncomfortable contradiction

On 25 March 2026, a ministerial expert group submitted its final report to Minister of Youth and Sport Mika Poutala, presenting 36 recommendations for rebuilding young people’s belief in their own future. The report landed in a moment of genuine national concern: YLE, Sitra, and others have been raising the alarm in recent days, and the ministry’s response signals that the issue has moved firmly onto the political agenda.

The backdrop is stark. Finland has just been ranked the world’s happiest country for the ninth consecutive year (World Happiness Report 2026). Yet beneath this headline, something troubling is taking shape (Yle 2026). Nearly half of Finnish young people aged 15–24 — 47%, according to the Finnish Red Cross Loneliness Barometer (2024) — report experiencing loneliness at least several times a month. The proportion of young people who view their own future optimistically has fallen to its lowest point in the sixteen-year history of the Youth Barometer (Happonen & Kiilakoski, 2025). In 2021, 27% of young people described themselves as very optimistic about the future; by 2024 that figure had collapsed to just 12%.

Future researcher Otto Tähkäpää, a member of the expert group, explains that adults cannot expect young people to believe in the future if adults themselves give them no real reason to do so. The expert group’s report identifies multiple causes — global crises, experiences of intergenerational injustice, and the way adults publicly talk about and to young people — and calls for broad structural reforms. What the report makes clear is that there are no quick fixes. As Tähkäpää noted, long-term societal change is needed — but there are also things that can be started today.

This article argues that entrepreneurship, approached in a light and community-based way, is one of those things.

A different and a positive paradox: the entrepreneurship surge

In this context, one data point stands out as genuinely surprising — and potentially important. At the very same moment that future belief has collapsed, young people’s interest in entrepreneurship has reached a historic high.

The NYT Youth Future Report 2025 (EK/Taloustutkimus, n=approx. 4,900 secondary and upper secondary students) found that 51% of young people could see themselves working as entrepreneurs — a record result, up 13 percentage points from just three years earlier. One in five of those interested in entrepreneurship already had a concrete business idea. The primary motivation was not only financial: young people wanted work that feels meaningful and aligned with their own values.

This finding is not isolated. The Youth Barometer 2019, the recent edition focused on work, found that 58% of young people wanted to try entrepreneurship at some point in their careers, and nearly 80% saw entrepreneurship as a way to influence society. The long-term trend is equally striking: in 2003, just 1% of 18–24-year-olds in Finland expressed interest in starting a company within three years; by 2015 that figure had risen to 20%, and growth has continued since (Global Entrepreneurship Monitor 2023-2024).

What this tells us is that young people have not lost their drive!

From paradox to programme: Humak’s perspective

This double paradox — loneliness and eroded future belief alongside rising entrepreneurial ambition — has been central to discussions within Humak’s research community, particularly as the Thriving Through Experiences research programme (Elinvoimaa Elämyksistä) and the Renewing Communities programme began preparing their joint contribution to an international research consortium exploring youth public health in a European context. This is in a preparatory phase.

What emerged from those conversations, shaped also by dialogue with international partners, was a reframing: the problem is not that young people lack motivation or ideas. The problem is that they lack the structural support, community, and experiential scaffolding to translate that motivation into action. Some places, schools and organisations (such as 4H or NY) do this but these actions are not reaching all communities.

Entrepreneurship, in this context, is not simply an economic strategy. For young people — especially in the creative industries, the experience economy, and the cultural sector — it is a pathway to agency, social connection, and a story about themselves that reaches into the future. It is also, crucially, something that can be done lightly, collaboratively, and with support.

Light entrepreneurship and the cooperative model

One of the most accessible and underutilised pathways for young people entering entrepreneurship is the cooperative model. Working through a cooperative, a young person can test an idea, build professional skills, invoice clients, and develop a network — without taking on the full legal and financial burden of establishing a sole trader business or a limited company.

Humak’s CREACOOP project, along with its follow-up initiatives, has been building exactly this kind of infrastructure also for young creative entrepreneurs. CREACOOP supports people in the creative and experience sectors in establishing and developing cooperative enterprises, with a particular focus on those who might otherwise find traditional entrepreneurship inaccessible. The model is not only economically practical — it is inherently social. A cooperative is, by definition, a community.

This connects directly to the CREVE platform (www.creve.fi), Humak’s national creative industries entrepreneurship service, which provides business planning, startup support, professional networking, and innovative learning formats from all Humak’s projects such as Pathways to Experience Economy.

What this suggests for policy and practice

The Thriving Through Experiences programme approaches youth entrepreneurship not as a standalone economic intervention but as part of a broader ecology of vitality, meaning, and belonging. We would argue that when young people are supported to create, to build something, and to do so within a community of peers, the effects extend well beyond the economic: they include increased sense of agency, reduced loneliness, and — critically — renewed belief that the future is something they can shape.

This is not a cure for the structural causes of youth loneliness, and it is not offered as one. But it is a resource that is currently underutilised in Finnish youth and health policy. Youth workers, cultural producers, and entrepreneurship educators and teachers are not peripheral figures in the public health landscape — they are, in many cases, the people best positioned to reach young people where they are, and to support them toward the meaningful action that restores future belief.

Finland’s paradox — happiest country, loneliest young generation — will not be resolved by any single intervention. But the energy is there. The ideas are there. The question is whether the structures are there to meet them.

Read more:

4H Enterprises, https://www.4h.fi/en/4h-enterprises-learn-and-earn/ 26.3.2026.

EK / NYT (2025). Nuorten tulevaisuusraportti: Nuorten yrittäjyysasenteet ennätysmyönteisiä. Helsinki: Elinkeinoelämän keskusliitto.

Finnish Red Cross (2024). Loneliness Barometer 2024. Helsinki: SPR.

Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM 2023-2024). Finnish youth entrepreneurship data, 2003–2024.

Happonen, K. & Kiilakoski, T. (eds.) (2025). Nuoruuden kolme vuosikymmentä. Nuorisobarometri 2024. Helsinki: Nuorisotutkimusseura.

NY News, https://nuortennyt.fi/en/current-topics/ 26.3.2026.

OKM (2026). Nuorten tulevaisuususko horjuu – millaisia toimia nyt tarvitaan? Helsinki: Opetus- ja kulttuuriministeriö. https://julkaisut.valtioneuvosto.fi/items/56339ac7-8520-40ea-b327-9670946c4578 26.3.2026

Oxford Wellbeing Research Centre / Gallup (2026). World Happiness Report 2026.

Rekola et al. (2025). Tulevaisuusbarometri. Helsinki: Sitra.

Tähkäpää, J. & Laita, S. (2025). Youth future belief as national strategic resource. Prime Minister’s Office, Finland.

Youth Barometer (2019). Work and entrepreneurship. Helsinki: Nuorisotutkimusseura.

YLE, Hanna Terävä (2026), Ministeriö säikähti nuorten optimismin romahdusta, nyt työryhmä vaatii isoja uudistuksia tulevaisuususkon palauttamiseksi. Ministeriö säikähti nuorten optimismin romahdusta, nyt työryhmä vaatii isoja uudistuksia tulevaisuus­uskon palauttamiseksi | Kotimaa | Yle 26.3.2026.

Humak’s related projects and sites (26.3.2026):

CreaCoop, https://www.humak.fi/en/projects/creacoop/

Creve, https://www.humak.fi/creve/

Polkuja Elämystalouteen (Pathways to Experience Ecnomy), https://www.humak.fi/polkuja-elamystalouteen/

Laura Päiviö-Häkämies, PhD, Principal Researcher, Thriving Through Experiences -Research Programme, HUMAK University of Applied Sciences.

Author:

The article draws on work developed as Humak’s contribution to an international research consortium preparatory process.

Laura Päiviö-Häkämies