When Bryant’s new Director of International Business Markus Paukku, Ph.D., taught at the University of Amsterdam, the business school and the school of economics were on opposite sides of one of the city’s famous canals.
“Some called it the widest canal in Amsterdam,” jokes Paukku, who helped build an interdisciplinary initiative combining the strengths of economics and international business that became one of the school’s fastest growing programs.
“While I don't consider Route 7 [which separates Bryant’s College of Business from the rest of the university] as a big divider, I don't want International Business to be something that's just focused on this part of campus,” he says. “The current business environment requires a good understanding of other disciplines, whether it's politics or law or economics or anything cross-cultural. I hope to build bridges to other parts of the university as we rethink what our future offerings in International Business should include.”
Paukku, who is also a professor in residence at Bryant, came to Smithfield in November 2025 after a decade at the University of Amsterdam Business School, where he co-founded the Amsterdam Living Case Lab, an experiential learning program that integrated real-world business challenges into management education.
A published author whose work focuses on strategic innovation, Paukku’s background includes consulting with private industry; directing a program at Aalto University focused on collaboration between Finnish companies and those in Silicon Valley; and completing a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University, where he worked on online learning.
Paukku recently sat down with Bryant News for an interview about his vision for Bryant’s International Business program.
Q: What made you want to return to the United States to run Bryant’s International Business (IB) program?
Paukku: International Business has been a big program at Bryant, and it's a great opportunity to rethink what’s already there to build on and what it's going to look like going forward. The program is different from a lot of other IB programs that are either stand-alone or sprinkle international business lessons throughout the curriculum. Bryant's IB major and IB concentration are very strong selling points for students. International business is a launchpad into all kinds of careers, and Bryant’s experiential learning commitment was something I was looking for.
Q: What does Bryant do well in the realm of international business, and where do you see opportunities for the program to improve?
Paukku: It’s impressive how fast Bryant can transform something from an idea to a full-fledged program. That agility is something that makes Bryant very attractive and competitive in the international business space.
It's not exclusively a Bryant issue, but international business in general has been a challenging field ever since the COVID-19 pandemic. A lot of programs that were thriving before COVID-19 have found themselves rebuilding. Given how much uncertainty there is in the business world right now, I think students who are taught to understand risk and nuance are going to be positioned to do well in this world.
"It’s impressive how fast Bryant can transform something from an idea to a full-fledged program. That agility is something that makes Bryant very attractive and competitive in the international business space."
Q: How would you describe your vision for Bryant’s IB program?
Paukku: I've had great conversations about interdisciplinary programming. For example, understanding business without understanding politics in 2026 is impossible. You need to understand the full picture, so making sure we include all kinds of perspectives is part of what I want to bring into the program.
IB is also known for being a very rigorous program; we want to champion that but also bring in a little more flexibility so that, if you didn't know you wanted to be an IB student when you came to Bryant, there are still opportunities to get into the program.
Q: How does your background in business consulting inform your work at Bryant?
Paukku: Theory is great, but we need to also prepare our students for the world they're entering, not just the one that the textbook tells you about. Having that connection to industry is important, whether when you're designing programs (what the learning outcome should be) or connecting students directly to companies through experiential projects or project-based learning.
"Theory is great, but we need to also prepare our students for the world they're entering, not just the one that the textbook tells you about."
Q: Tell us more about the Living Case Lab you co-founded at the University of Amsterdam.
Paukku: As an R1 university, we had a great research profile. What I felt could be strengthened was the connection to practice, so I started a program where we engaged with companies to get more experiential learning in the classroom — NGOs, startups, a whole range of companies. That’s already here at the core of Bryant’s program.
I also built a project focused on scaling university initiatives. For instance, if you had an idea developed through a program like the Living Case Lab, how could you make it something that could be part of the fabric of the university? Bryant has done that for its AI initiative, which has been driven very quickly through the whole university.
Q: “Strategic novelty” has been a focus of your research work. Can you explain that concept and how it relates to IB?
Paukku: We wanted to know where new strategies and innovations come from. If 90 percent of companies in an industry are doing one thing, what are the other 10 percent doing? We were really focused on these outliers: companies that had different business models than everyone else; labs run by citizen scientists that were competing with established pharma companies; interesting organizations that were challenging the status quo and coming up with a lot of innovations.
We learned to distinguish between what might be an error and an emerging business model, and how to have an intelligent conversation around novelty and things that we don't understand yet.
Q: That seems to align well with the entrepreneurial spirit at Bryant.
Paukku: Yes: I visited Bryant’s Sprague Center for Entrepreneurship and Design Thinking before it opened. During my Ph.D. program at Finland, I used to take my business students and engineering students to a space like this to do prototyping. It was about finding a common language to talk about building something new.
Q: What excites you about beginning this new journey at Bryant?
When you have students from design and business and entrepreneurship working together it's like the real world, where you don't just work with people that are from your major. Having moved all around the world in my career, I look forward to translating the excitement that I have for IB into opportunities for students and strengthening IB back into the flagship program that put Bryant on the map in the past.