Why the change?

I want to thank all of you for giving me such a warm welcome on 1 April 2009 when I started as the President of Aalto University. I hope that a similar team spirit will characterise our cooperation in the future, too.

Exchanging ideas is a prerequisite for all successful interaction: we cannot work together unless we understand each other’s motivation, experiences and dreams. As the President of Aalto, I have promised to listen to and take into account the opinions of the staff and students. To provide a forum for this dialogue, I will now launch a monthly President’s Blog, where I will discuss topics arising from your feedback and other issues concerning our university.

The establishment of Aalto University is a bold venture, which will change the face of the Finnish academic world. Why did we embark on it? The constant changes in the surrounding world both pressures and enables us to change the structures of society.

The reform of the European higher education systems aims at intensifying international cooperation and facilitating the mobility of expertise. Unlike, for instance, in Asia, the share of young people in the Finnish population is ever-decreasing - and our aging population needs new kinds of services.

Our traditional manufacturing industries are struggling and relocating their operations to other countries. To make up for the jobs lost in these industries, we need businesses based on new kind of expertise.

Today, satisfying the national needs for expertise requires innovation founded on basic research, cooperation between various actors and sectors and the adoption of a multinational approach. To address climate change and the ever-worsening waste problems, we need to take sustainable development as a shared goal.

In other words, the current need for renewal does not spring from prior failure; all the schools of the future Aalto University are internationally recognised experts in their fields. Instead, the change we are now undergoing is an opportunity for us to meet new challenges as described above.

It has become evident that a multidisciplinary approach and cross-disciplinary cooperation bring about new ways of thinking and stimulate innovation. Working together towards a common goal in teams of experts with very different backgrounds is inspiring and rewarding; exploring the interfaces between disciplines leads to unexpected results, and the surprises lead to new discoveries.

I have already had a chance to see the benefits of combining the viewpoints of science, arts and business even in my own work. Such cooperation does not undermine the importance of any party involved. Rather, the different fields complement and inspire each other, leading to new forms of expertise. To reach our ambitions goals, we also need our highly skilled support staff that contributes to this change.

Universities foster culture and education and represent an essential driving force of progress; we have to lead the way towards sustainable development at all levels. Let our broad goal be ‘a good life’; to define it more precisely, we need to engage in constructive discussion on the values of the University.