[Practitioner Seminar] Paula Bruszewska, Zwolnieni Z Teorii Foundation

Abstract

In 2013, three Polish graduates asked a simple question: what if teenagers could learn by solving real problems instead of reading about them? Twelve years and 170,000 participants later, Beyond Theory (Zwolnieni z Teorii) is Poland's largest practical olympiad for youth - with over 7,500 social ventures completed annually under the patronage of the Polish Minister of Education, and in partnership with Google, Coca-Cola, ING, PwC, Microsoft, and the Project Management Institute. The trajectory is instructive. Beyond Theory began by working directly with students. It then progressively engaged teachers, then schools - and only after demonstrating that 20,000 students were actively participating alongside their teachers each year did it become a catalyst for a formal change to the national schooling curriculum. It is a textbook case of bottom-up institutional change, made possible by technology that could bring a mindset-training methodology to scale in a way that would have been unthinkable otherwise. That methodology - social-action projects - has been documented through years of learning outcomes and impact studies. The data consistently shows that participants develop what researchers have variously called 4C or 5C competencies: creativity, critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and a sense of agency. These are, not coincidentally, the competencies that schooling systems across the world are urgently trying to cultivate in the AI era. In this seminar, Paula Bruszewska will present the Beyond Theory model and its evolution from grassroots initiative to national


policy influence. She will also extend an explicit invitation for further academic research. 

 Paula is actively seeking collaborations with management scholars and is prepared to offer access to the organization, its data, and its network. Potential research angles span multiple RSM departments:

• Platform governance and distributed innovation - how a digital platform coordinates 1,500+ autonomous youth ventures per year; why teacher involvement increases project completion rates fourfold

• Organizational behavior and competency development - agency and skill formation in self-organized teams without formal authority structures

• Strategic management and institutional entrepreneurship - the full bottom-up to top-down diffusion trajectory, and the conditions that made it possible

• Business-society management - a hybrid model where Google, Coca-Cola, and the Polish Ministry of Education co-invest in the same initiative

About the speaker:

Paula Bruszewska co-founded Beyond Theory at age 24. She holds degrees from SGH Warsaw School of Economics and the University of St. Gallen, and previously worked at Procter & Gamble in Geneva. She has been recognized as Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe (2016) and MIT Technology Review Social Innovator of the Year (2016), and was elected Ashoka Fellow in 2022. She most recently spoke at Impact'25 alongside Barack Obama, Francis Fukuyama, and John Kerry.