TAF – How can universities give students a kick to go global?

The international seminar "How Universities give students a kick to go global?" was kicked off in Demola by Jukka Siltanen and Taru Söderlund. Jukka invited the audience to ponder: "What can I learn?" and "How is it important to me personally?"

As Jukka pointed out, most importantly, TAF seminar is a day to celebrate TAMK students and their achievements! The speakers spoke of art and internationalism from different perspectives.

Andrea Zapata Girau showed a trailer of her up-coming Flamenco Movie, and Pekka Saari spoke about his film Memory of tomorrow, especially about combining the production with postproduction. Pekka Niskanen told the audience of the exhibition his students are having first at Werstas in Tampere and then in Dortmund. He also shared his experiences in the international art world. Then Robert Niva and Martti Sirkkola demonstrated their 3D animation project, in which they had learned the entire process of doing a 3D animation by doing it together, in a group, instead of relying on traditional lecture-based education. They explained the importance of using the wisdom of crowds and social media application in learning and producing art.


After the break it was time for Jukka Siltanen to take the stage again. Jukka talked about Hub Tampere and entrepreneurship. Hub Tampere is all about joint entrepreneurship and sharing both skills, ideas and resources. Hub Tampere has already had some excellent success, and Jukka sounded very optimistic about its future. The Proacademy students presented their projects: a Tampere guidebook for exchange students, a football tournament and its afterparty. Then producer Timo Vierimaa, spoke about his film, the "Steam of Life" ("Miesten vuoro") and how he succeeded in making his film truly international. According to Vierimaa, the keys to success are good presentation and communication skills along with patience.

The final speaker of the event was Juho Hartikainen from Score game development club, who explained how the Score game club came to be. Hartikainen emphasised the fact that the students who have the enthusism and drive to do new, innovative things, should be supported and encouraged. The students should feel like they are working for the school instead of just in the school. Siltanen, Vierimaa, Niva and Sirkkola as well as the highly interesting Proacademy projects, all highlighted the fact that so much of today's learning takes place outside the traditional classroom environment. This type of learning must be supported and nurtured, for it is the key to national and international success.


Andrea Zapata Girau final thesis work at TAMK

Links:
http://www.memoryoftomorrow.com
http://tamk-artmedia.blogspot.com/2010/04/promoting-changes-exhibition-to-inter.html
http://3danimationproject.wordpress.com
http://hubtampere.wordpress.com
http://www.proakatemia.fi
http://score.igda.fi/

So in TAMK, you can really earn credits by arranging Speeddates?

Well, I guess you can. At least we do.

Our project group, consisting of TAMK students, have put together two nights of mischief and mingling in which some 20 people of the opposite sex are going to have miniature dates of 3-4 minutes with all the other 20 persons. 

The first speed-date night will be held at Groove on the 17th of March and the second, a week later, on the 24th of March at Tabu. The night at Groove is targeted for people between the ages 19-27 and the Tabu night for the ages 25 to 35. Check out our website http://www.deiteille.com . From the “ilmoittaudu” section, you sign yourself in. We already have enough women, but for men there are still couple free spots.

Both of out events have stunning afterparties in same locations, so feel welcome to join the fun! Doors will open at 10 pm.

Events:
17.3. Groove Bar & Cellar, Aleksanterinkatu 22
24.3. Tabu Wine Bar & Ultra Lounge, Hämeenkatu 10

Speeddates 8 €
Afterparty 4 €, (free for our daters)

Our site is only in finnish, but in case of questions, you can reach us by email from info@deiteille.com.

Story: Tiina Heikkilä and Teemu Oikkonen

Interesting Innovation Conglomerate Building at Tampere

The Hub is an initiative to build a network of places around the world where entrepreneurs, innovators and changemakers can meet and work together to tackle the world's most pressing social, cultural and environmental challenges. A place is needed to inspire and support imaginative and enterprising initiatives for a radically better world.

In the historical Finlayson district at the heart of Tampere a unique innovation environment is being born. Purpose of this innovation environment is to create social innovations by connecting companies needs and ideas with extraordinary student and professional talents across disciplines. Finlayson also hosts TAMK School Art and Media and Proacademy, a unit for entrepreneurship students bringing diversity and business thinking into the mix.

We saw that The Hub would be a perfect match for this environment. It would build sustainability and social entrepreneurship into the innovation initiatives and new enterprises, it could act as an interface between the parties and facilitate ambitious people and start-ups to work together.

Hub Tampere is currently being established by TAMK Proacademy in cooperation with Hermia and the Creative Tampere programme. Our goal is to open Hub Tampere in spring 2010.

Story: Jukka Siltanen

Hub Tampere Blog

Photo: The planned home of the Hub at Finlayson

ProAcademy received greetings from its sister unit in Namibia

This message made us very happy and we want to share it with everyone:

To: proAcademy Students

Hello Guys, Sisters and Brothers,

ProLearning is the sister school of ProAcademy in Windhoek, Namibia. We are the pilot team of ProLearning and we are a team of 14 members (including Clarissa from WeDesign). Our company name is PLEMJIVE Cooperative LTD.

We would like to inform you on what is going on with ProLearning and our company. We would also like to create a deeper relationship between ProLearning and ProAcademy students.

Since you guys dont know us, here is our brief introduction. Please guys check the attached pictures to see the spirit of ProLearning…

Yours sincerly,
Plemjive members

Slide Show Pro Learning

View more presentations from TAMK University of Applied Sciences.

Nordic and Baltic Business Week challenged 30 international students to innovate!

Thirty students from Denmark, Norway, Lithuania and Finland participated in the Nordplus Intensive Course Business in the Nordic and Baltic Countries, which took place in Tampere on 19. - 25.9.2009.

The objective of the intensive course was to learn about business, innovation and Nordic and Baltic cooperation by working together. Students formed teams of 6-8 people, and found solutions to a real customer case during a 48-hour innovation task.

The intensive course was organized by Nordic and Baltic Business Innovation Network coordinated by PIRAMK. The Network members are currently TAMK and PIRAMK from Finland, University of Tromsø from Norway, University of Southern Denmark from Denmark, and Vytautas Magnus University from Lithuania. This was the third time that the Nordic Business Week took place at TAMK Proacademy, a special unit in entrepreneurship at TAMK.

Earlier the customer had been Nokia Innovation Center and the teams worked on business concepts and new products using future technologies. Nokia recently published a concept video which has some of the earlier teams' ideas.

This year the theme of the week was social entrepreneurship and the customer was the non-profit innovation agency Hermia Ltd. The teams' task was to develop a business concept of the social enterprise Hub Tampere in the context of Finlayson's innovation environment. The teams worked on the task at the wonderful Kauppila farm in the city of Ikaalinen.

Watch the documentary video about the innovation task on Vimeo:
http://vimeo.com/6910350

Photos from the week are available on Flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jukkasiltanen/sets/72157622527213876

The Nordic and Baltic Business Innovation Network network has an open Ning community at:

http://nabbi-network.ning.com

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The Hub is an initiative to build a network of places around the world where entrepreneurs, innovators and changemakers can meet and work together to tackle the world’s most pressing social, cultural and environmental challenges. A place is needed to inspire and support imaginative and enterprising initiatives for a radically better world.

Dr. Helmut Voulliéme, Guest from Ostfalia UAS

Dr. Helmut Voulliéme, Professor in Interactive Media from Ostfalia University of Applied Sciences (earlier Braunschweig/Wolfenbüttel UAS) paid a visit to TAMK this week. On Wednesday he visited TAMK main campus to meet Head of International Office Riku-Matti Kinnunen & other international office staff members and Director of R&D Perttu Heino.

Ostfalia UAS has been TAMK partner for a long time and the exchange and cooperation have been intense, but there has been no contacts in the fields of art and media. On Thursday Helmut Voulliéme visited the School of Art and Media at Finlayson Campus.

Helmut Voulliéme is head of the Media Design Programme which started a couple of years ago in Salzgitter Campus of the university, so he is the right person to talk about extending cooperation between Ostfalia and TAMK to include exchange and other cooperation between the Ostfalia Media Design Programme and TAMK Media Programme during the visit. The result of the visit was excellent, and we might see professors and students from Salzgitter already in May participating in School of Art and Media International Week 3-7 of May.

After the School of Art and Media tour he visited our neighbour, the ProAcademy study programme in entrepreneurship, which was introduced by Jukka Siltanen.
Of course there was also a visit to Demola, the joint innovation space of companies and students of all Tampere Universities.

Ostfalia UAS

Demola
ProAcademy
Pictured: Dr. Helmut Voulliéme in the roof garden of School of Art and Media

Visitor from the UK

Prof. Ian Arnott from the University of Teesside in the United Kingdom visited TAMK from 2nd of February to the 5th of February. He gave a course about sports management and marketing in English.

In addition to his teaching at TAMK, Ian had the time to meet with some Business Administration teachers, the people from the Education Technology Centre as well as to visit proAcademy. The busy schedule also included a quick trip to the practice enterprise trade fair at Pakkahuone. Ian is hoping to be able to come back to Tampere and Finland, preferably when it’s warmer, though. He is interested in further collaboration with the degree programme of Business Administration.

Joint Entrepreneurship Project with Polytechnic of Namibia and TAMK ProAcademy is nearly there

For the past year Polytechnic of Namibia and TAMK’s special unit in entrepreneurship, ProAcademy, have been working together on a project to create a degree program in entrepreneurship for the Polytechnic of Namibia.

The project hosted a one-month fieldwork period in August-September in Namibia for four ProAcademy students and two coaches. During this fieldwork period a feasibility study on the model was completed together with the local students, faculty and businesses. The feasibility study established that the ProAcademy model would work well in the local context supporting entrepreneurial development and the state of Namibia in its Vision 2030. Polytechnic of Namibia decided to start their own proacademy already in February 2009 with a pilot team.

In continuation to the feasibility study two Namibian students Karen Vries and Lennord Eiseb from the pilot team and two upcoming coaches Suleiman Mbaziira and Carlos Ndjavera come to ProAcademy at the end of the October for two weeks of training. Objective of the training was to become acquainted with methods of ProAcademy and open the visitors’ understanding of the concept of these entrepreneurship studies. During their stay the Namibians took part in a lot of exercises and gained good tips and practical tools for studying and learning in a new way.

Karen and Lennord especially liked the good spirit and culture of TAMK’s ProAcademy. Suleiman and Carlos took notice of students’ creative and innovative thinking. Everybody thought however that the most important things in ProAcademy are definitely the trust between team members and taking responsibility for the team.

Karen, Lennord, Suleiman and Carlos have learned a lot but there are still some things to work on. When they are starting the proacademy in Namibia next spring, they will get assistance from Jutta Myyryläinen, a ProAcademy student, who is going to Namibia for the spring to complete her final thesis.

There are some pictures of the fieldwork period in TAMK Business School's blog.

Inspirations and insights from Denmark

Greetings from Denmark - Land of flat plains, bridges, rain, innovative universities, stylish design and very nice people!

University of Southern Denmark (SDU) in Odense and Copenhagen University College of Engineering (IHK) are among TAMK's partner universities in Denmark. During the first week of December I was at an Erasmus staff exchange in Odense and I had the chance to meet many of the staff and students who are teaching and studying at both institutions in various engineering and international programs. I was very inspired by the visit and wanted to share some highlights here in TAMK's international blog.

First I visited Copenhagen University College of Engineering and especially their semester-long exchange programs. Innovation and Business Design Semester is a 30 ECTS program for everyone interested business development and innovation regardless of the discipline studies. It runs both in spring and autumn and it has modules for example in cross-cultural management and marketing, innovation and business design, and global business development. Their also have a very popular program called European Project Semester where interdisciplinary students across Europe work together on large projects. I also encourage our engineering students to have a look at their International Business Semester which a program specifically designed to give general business skills to engineering students. Many modules from these programs are also available in their Summer School programs. For more information, check http://ihk.dk/international/exchange-students for details.

I spent the rest of the week at University of Southern Denmark in Odense where I worked together with my colleagues from SDU and University of Tromsø to design an innovation camp concept based on our experiences from the Nordic Business Week at TAMK ProAcademy that would allow students in our Nordic partner network to work on company assignments and innovation cases together in week-long workshops in Finland, Norway and Denmark. Draft of the concept is now ready and we will soon contact other partners and companies about it for feedback. We plan to organize the first innovation camp using this concept next year in Finland and then 2010 in Denmark and Norway.

Another definitive highlight of the SDU visit was meeting local integrated design students who were here in Tampere a couple of months ago for the Nordic Business Week. They introduced me to their study methods, group work and equipment that they use in their studies. I especially liked the problem-based projects on which they work in teams for the semester. Very challenging and practical tasks that require a lot of teamwork and coordination. They also had some very cool equipment for their studies: Who has heard of a 3d-printer which prints the object when you send it a cad-drawing?! Very nice!! SDU has an international exchange program in integrated design among other interesting programs ;) ...

Next year in April University of Southern Denmark is organizing an international week where we plan to try different innovation and brainstorming techniques for different real-world problems. I hope some TAMK students will have a chance to take part in this.

University of Southern Denmark students who were in Tampere and who I also met in Odense

Jukka Siltanen

TAMK ProAcademy Coach