Hana Milanov
Hana Milanov is Professor of Entrepreneurship and Strategy. She works with entrepreneurial leaders to discover and develop opportunities, mobilize resources, and build the teams and organizations that drive growth at home and abroad. Across her work, she is interested in challenging received wisdom about who succeeds in entrepreneurship and why, surfacing the unexamined assumptions in how founders, investors, and institutions evaluate entrepreneurial potential, and pointing toward what entrepreneurial practice could become.
“I believe entrepreneurship isn’t reserved for founders. It’s a way of thinking and acting that challenges what everyone takes for granted. The strongest leaders question who creates value and how, what’s still serving a business and what isn’t, and so unlock opportunities worth pursuing. That discipline has never mattered more.”
In the classroom, Milanov is known for experiential and immersive learning: participants develop their own new venture projects, work with live cases that bring entrepreneurial leaders and their ventures into the room, and participate in international immersions in which an entire entrepreneurial ecosystem becomes the learning environment.
Milanov’s work bridges academia and practice. She sits on the investment committee of the Munich-based deep-tech VC fund, Spacewalk, and serves on the boards of two flagship Munich entrepreneurship programs – CDTM and Manage & More – whose alumni have founded 280+ companies, raised more than €8.7bn in funding, and produced nine unicorns. For her support of founders, she was distinguished as one of 20 Unipreneurs, Germany’s top professors fostering entrepreneurship, under the patronage of two federal ministries.
Her research has been published in leading journals such as Strategic Management Journal, Journal of Business Venturing, and Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, and her work has been featured in Forbes. She is also an associate editor at the Journal of Business Venturing Insights. She has delivered executive workshops for corporate clients (including Siemens) and for high-growth ventures (including the Deutsche Börse Venture Network), and has taught executives, entrepreneurs, and students across five countries: Australia, Croatia, Germany, Spain, and the United States, winning multiple awards for teaching.
Milanov is currently on leave of absence from the Technical University of Munich, where she is Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship and served as Academic Director of the EMBA in Innovation and Business Creation, delivered in partnership with UnternehmerTUM, ranked Europe’s #1 startup hub by the Financial Times in 2024, 2025, and 2026, and previously as TUM’s Senior Vice-President for International Alliances and Alumni. From 2007 to 2012, she was Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship at IE Business School in Madrid, where she also contributed to the IE-Brown EMBA program. A native of Croatia, she holds a PhD in Entrepreneurship and Strategy from the Kelley School of Business, Indiana University.