An “As Told To” interview by Kristaps Kovalonoks, Research Coordinator at Aalto School of Business.
This interview is part of a first-person storytelling series highlighting the personal journeys, ideas, and insights of members of Aalto University’s Entrepreneurship Unit (ENTU). Real stories, told in their own words.
What motivates someone to leave behind a corporate marketing career with global cosmetics brands in Greece to pursue academic research on poverty, refugee crises, and democratic backsliding? In this interview, Associate Professor Myrto Chliova reflects on her journey from Greece to Aalto University in Finland, her early interest in social entrepreneurship, and how she encourages students to think critically about the role of business in society.
My name is Myrto, and I'm originally from Athens, Greece. I studied business and marketing because I wasn’t entirely initially quite sure what I wanted to do, and marketing was a prestigious field in Athens at the time. Afterwards, I went to London and completed a master’s in management at what is now Bayes Business School. Then I returned to Greece, and worked for a while as a marketing executive.
I later decided to shift to academia and moved to Barcelona to pursue a PhD at ESADE Business School. I had a bit of a love affair with Spain and all things Spanish, so that also played a role in my choice of location. By the end of my PhD, I was pretty committed to staying in academia and started looking for opportunities across Europe.
Finland was not really on my radar, but a position at Aalto came up and it looked really good. I received positive feedback from others who were already at Aalto, including some Greeks, and decided to try it out. That was back in 2015, and I have been here ever since.
I gave industry a try, but I felt that marketing was not really for me in the long term. In the beginning, of course, every new job brings learning and discovery. But I think I was missing the competitiveness and drive to constantly boost numbers and sell more products, which is essential if you want to build a successful long-term career in that field.
There was quite a lot of administrative work and not much room for creativity, at least in my experience at the time in Greece. I had gone into marketing thinking there would be a strong creative element, but in reality most of the work was execution-focused.
I have always been a fairly intellectually inclined person, and I started to feel that academia might offer more space to explore new ideas, read, think, and write. These were things that were mostly missing from my work in industry at the time.
When I decided to do a PhD, I wanted to steer toward issues that I felt were meaningful, but within my expertise in the broader field of management. I did not want to do a PhD in marketing, so I started looking into how people were trying to create social value while using business or management principles.
At the time, that led me to a very niche area called social entrepreneurship. It was not something many people had heard of back then, but I found it inspiring that we could think about doing good through business. I think it spoke to my idealistic nature at the time, even if I have become more of a realist since then.
Over the years, this field has grown a lot. There is now a much larger community of researchers studying how management and entrepreneurship connect with big societal challenges like poverty, inequality, or refugee crises. I feel lucky to have found this space early on.
It really depends on the project. When I was researching social entrepreneurship and how it tries to address poverty, I was speaking to people from many different parts of the world. That field started out in places like the US and UK, but many of the actual projects were happening in regions such as Africa, Latin America, and Asia. In later work, I looked at how grassroots initiatives responded to the refugee crisis in Greece, which was something I felt personally connected to. More recently, I have studied how civil society organisations and activist groups have responded to democratic backsliding in Hungary. I have also done research in Finland, where I looked at more mainstream organisations and how entrepreneurs promote social values like fair wages or corporate responsibility. So sometimes the focus is global, and sometimes it is very local.
One project that stands out is not published yet, but it has been very meaningful to me. It looks at how civil society organisations and different activist groups had to change in order to respond to democratic backsliding in Hungary. It is a very difficult topic and in many ways not a happy story, but at the same time it is inspiring.
Despite everything, there is grassroots action and entrepreneurial effort to find solutions, to innovate, and to persevere even in extremely challenging circumstances. I could probably not persevere in the way that activists and civil society leaders in such contexts do, and I have a lot of respect for them. Being able to witness their work and bring more attention to it through research is something I find very important.
These are two very different courses. Social Innovation is one I designed myself, and it is very aligned with my research interests. I saw it as a chance to bring together my own academic work and what I have learned over the years, and share that with students. My thinking behind the course was that we already offer many how-to courses in entrepreneurship, which are important, but sometimes we ask students to build something without them fully understanding what already exists.
In this course, I wanted to create space for more critical thinking. We spend time looking at different social enterprises and innovations from around the world, exploring in what ways they have succeeded and also where they have failed. The aim is to help students reflect on the complexities, and to see both the possibilities and the limitations. I think this has been appreciated, and the students have responded with enthusiasm.
The Market Entry Strategies course is much more focused on core ideas from strategy and microeconomics. It is simulation and case-based and helps students understand strategic and economic trade-offs and business positioning. It is a very flexible course that can also be attended remotely, and gives students a solid foundation in economic decision-making and the opportunity to apply it to simulated and real problems. I taught this course for a few years, and now it will be continued by a colleague.
I am also excited to teach two new courses from this year, one on methods and one on paper development, to the Doctoral students of our Management Studies department.
I think Aalto, and Finnish academic culture more generally, is very non-hierarchical and egalitarian. That fits well with how I think relationships should work, both among colleagues and between professors and students. Most of the time, this is a very good thing. There is not too much formality, and we can be quite direct with one another, which also helps in teaching.
Aalto is the top business school in Finland, and it aims to be one of the top European schools as well. There is definitely a strong focus on high-quality research, and that also means providing researchers with the time and resources they need to do their work. I would say the culture is very friendly. The university sets high goals for its academic staff but does so through an approachable and supportive environment.
ENTU has always been a very friendly place to be. When I joined, we were a very small team, just two or three professors at the time, and now we have grown to five, plus one lecturer, and we are currently recruiting another. Over the years, it has been really nice to see how the unit has developed.
We are one of the most international units at the School of Business, and that was part of the vision from the beginning. Our first unit head wanted to create an international team, and I think that intention has shaped the culture. We are still small enough that people know each other and have personal connections. It feels inclusive and supportive, and I would say we are at a kind of sweet spot in terms of size and atmosphere. It is definitely a privilege to be part of this unit.
Academia is often quite incremental, so it is not always easy to point to a single moment where everything clicks. Of course there are moments of achievement, but if I had to choose, I think the clearest sense of impact comes through teaching.
When I receive very warm comments from students or see that the course ratings are strong, and they tell me that they really benefited from what we did together, that feels meaningful. It gives a kind of direct and immediate sense that I did something useful and that it mattered to someone else.
It may sound like a cliché, but students really are the hope for the future. So if I can help them in some way, or make them look at something from a new perspective, then that is deeply gratifying.
That is a tricky question. I think I am quite a predictable person. But maybe people do not know that I used to be a bit more of a daredevil. When I was finishing my PhD, I travelled alone in Colombia for several months and had quite a few adventures along the way. That is something I used to do when I was younger. Now that I have a family, it is a bit more difficult.
Over the years, I have picked up a range of hobbies. I have done all kinds of dancing, from African dance to flamenco. I also enjoy making jewellery, and I used to practise martial arts. So I guess there are a few things that people might or might not know about me.
For students, I would say that entrepreneurship is not only about becoming a startup founder-though of course that can be a path. But more broadly, it is really about developing transferable skills. These include learning how to innovate, how to push for change, and how to find meaning in your work. These skills can be useful in many different careers, in top and middle management roles across a range of disciplines, also beyond traditional business fields. It can also be something that is personally fulfilling. Even at the bachelor's level, students can already take courses in entrepreneurship, explore it in practice, and see what it offers. And at masters’ level, it can be a great choice after both management and other degrees.
For those considering a PhD, I think entrepreneurship is a very dynamic and fast-growing academic field. Compared to some other areas in management, the prospects are often better. It is also quite inclusive, so you can explore quite non-mainstream topics and still be part of the field. Entrepreneurship has many facets beyond the Silicon Valley type. If someone is interested in the phenomenon of entrepreneurship, then I think it is a great research stream to consider, including many possibilities.
