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I talked with Heidi Rundt, CEO of Hyper Island, the Sweden-born creative business school that has spent thirty years training people in design, marketing, and innovation. Hyper Island now runs programs across Europe, the UK, Japan, and South America, but what struck me isn’t the reach. It’s how untraditional the model still is.
The school has no teachers. Instead, it works with in-house facilitators and a global network of industry practitioners who bring in whatever is actually happening in the market right now. As Heidi put it, “We actually don’t have any teachers.”
She told me about Hyper Island’s online Master’s program, run with TSAD University. It’s delivered almost entirely online for a year and a half, with one exception: an intensive first week in Stockholm called the Hyper Island Way Week, built purely so the cohort can form trust before they scatter across time zones.
We also talked about AI. Heidi doesn’t see it as a threat. “Our point of view as an organization is that we definitely see AI as a possibility,” she told me, and the program has been redesigned around it rather than protected from it.
My favorite part of the conversation was her distinction between management and leadership, and what it actually takes to run an AI transformation inside a company:
“It cannot only be allowing the workforce to use ChatGPT. That is not AI transformation.”
There’s more in the full conversation, including the Swedish military framework baked into Hyper Island’s methodology, and why Heidi believes the school has to stay as entrepreneurial as the students it trains.
Listen/watch the full episode or read the show notes.
Till the next time ✨
All my best,
Egle
