Aalto combines three universities to get better ideas

I joined the International Design Business Management (IDBM) program at the Helsinki School of Economics in 1997. The two-year program gave me access to two other universities, the Helsinki University of Technology and the Helsinki University of Art and Design.  

12 years later, I’m standing at the Finlandia Hall with 2500 other guests watching the grand opening of the new Aalto University, and witnessing these three universities becoming one.

Perhaps the 1995 founded IDBM program served as a test bed and working prototype for the new Aalto collaboration. During my own studies I was convinced of at least one thing: knowing how people think in other fields cannot be harmful for anybody who ever has to deal with creating delivering new things and solutions to the world. Eventually essential is: 1) does one have anything to say 2) how well one can frame it 3) who gets interested. 

New ideas typically emerge at the boundaries and crossing points of different disciplines, on the grey fields that are nobody’s responsibility or in anybody’s interest. In these fields there are constantly opening and closing meeting points that are too unclear to be stated or staffed. Still, it is exactly in these fuzzy terrains in which the fruits of a carefully and creatively conducted dialogue can help Aalto meet its expectations. 

As the university's new president Tuula Teeri stated in her opening speech, we’re all global citizens and today’s challenges are too complex to be solved by one discipline or nation alone. The request to collaborate across disciplines, institutions, nations and continents is ever growing.

Perhaps not everyone in the Aalto community is yet happy together, because it is more comfortable to be alone or with likeminded people than with those who think or act differently. Now each member of Aalto has to decide for oneself, how they want to greet the new.

Some are afraid their professional identity and agency fades and becomes forgotten if money is only directed to the three power areas (marketing, design, technology), where it seems to offer the quickest and most obvious return. But this worry may prove wrong, since it certainly is not only the mainstream elements that will push Aalto ahead of its competitors.

 
The new president Tuula Teeri held part of her opening speech in Second Life.