Sotamaa is the man behind the initiative to start a new Innovation University in Finland, by bringing together three Finnish top universities: the University of Art and Design Helsinki (TAIK), the University of Technology (TKK) and the Helsinki School of Economics (HSE).

The goal for the new university is to be one of the leading institutions in the world in terms of research and education in the field of technology, business studies and art and design.

The new university is due to start in August 1, 2009.

The initiative is a much bigger and ambitious version of a general multidisciplinary approach that is currently also being implemented in some other major centres of education. Design-London at RCA-Imperial will create an ‘innovation triangle’ between design (represented by the Royal College of Art), engineering and technology (represented by Imperial College Faculty of Engineering) and the business of innovation (represented by Imperial’s Tanaka Business School). Carnegie Mellon University puts design, engineering, and business students into teams to work on projects. And the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management pairs MBAs with design students in product development classes.



You are leading the Helsinki University of Art and Design, but have been active in policy making, also internationally, for many years.

I have been President of the University of Art and Design for 21 years and in that position I have been able to influence development within design and within the creative industry in a significant way.

I have been involved in drafting many national policy programmes for design, for creative industries, for art and arts policy, and also worked on the creativity strategy for the country, promoting creativity within Finnish society on various levels.

Besides that, I have been founder and President of Cumulus, the International Association of Universities and Colleges of Art, Design and Media. That is a global organization with 124 members coming from all continents. So I have also been involved quite a lot in the international educational arena.


You are a designer by training. Are you still teaching?

No, I work full time on leading the university, on policy issues in Finland and on being an advisor for universities in Denmark, Korea and China, I am also internationally involved in developing art and design education, research and educational policies.


Why did you embark on this new initiative in Finland to bring together the three main universities - of Business, Design and Engineering - into one Innovation University?

The background is manifold.

Like many other industrialised countries we are aware that our future is very closely dependent on the capability to produce advanced knowledge, and to apply that knowledge in the development of our society. Many countries are doing big investments to develop education and research, both in Europe – for instance Denmark, the UK and Germany – as in Asia, with China particularly, but also India and Korea. So there is increasing competition of knowledge and talent related to producing that knowledge.

But it is not enough to produce knowledge as such. You also you have to be able to implement the knowledge in a creative and efficient way. How to improve the innovative capability of Finland and what could be the role of universities in this?

The third issue is a paradigm shift from technology-lead development to human centred innovation processes. There design plays a particular role. Design is a human-centred innovation activity. That is why design is so important in this paradigm shift.

Fourth, many studies show us that innovation processes in companies fail because the various people involved in it, engineers, business people, designers, do not understand each other. They do not understand each other’s language, and they do not understand how the other people think and solve problems. This is a big problem in the innovation process. Even if companies have capable and talented people on staff, they might not be able to use technology in an integrated way or use their knowledge efficiently, so they can benefit from it.


How did you convince these other two entities, the business and the engineering universities to join forces with you?

We were all aware that something had to be done in Finland. In Finland things are not decided top down, but bottom up. Our Government asked universities to think what they would like to do and make proposals. This initiative, to create a new Innovation University out of these three existing universities, came from the universities themselves, not from the government. So the idea is driven by the universities themselves.

In the beginning, universities were not rushing for merger, but they all understood that this would be an interesting path to explore. Initially people were not ready for such a big leap.

Then we had a working group lead by the Permanent Secretary of the Minister of Finance The three university presidents were also included and a few representatives from Finnish industry.

The crucial question we addressed was how to create through this merger a world-class university. So the ambition level was high enough to get everybody on board. Everybody understood that if this merger of the three disciplines, of the three areas of knowledge would be done in an ambitious way, it could lead to a development of a totally new kind of university.

It also helped that at that time we also wanted to make reforms within the Finnish university system itself, by separating universities from the government and making them independent. We realised that the Innovation University could be a way to achieve that independence.

We were therefore able to create a package that included all the reforms we wanted to make – in research, in education and in institutional autonomy – and that was then called the Innovation University.


Who were your main supporters in this?

We were lucky that our politicians saw this opportunity and were ambitious and open enough in their thinking.

We also had strong support from the Finnish industry to do something radical. They also saw the need to raise the level of education and research, and also for a new kind of knowledge. They were aware of the paradigm shift that we are going through.

So with the support from politicians and industry, the industry was also willing to give the project its financial support, thereby becoming a major funder of education and research in Finland.

Many things came together and now we are in the middle of planning it. In 22 months it should be in operation.

I think we were all surprised that such a radical proposal ended up going through and that we were able to go forward with it.


What would you study at the Innovation University? What programmes are being offered? To what extent is it different from just some of the three parts?

We want to implement a totally innovative learning concept in the new university. We don’t yet know exactly how to do it, but the learning processes will definitely be changed radically. We want to create a burning passion to learn and to explore unknown frontiers.

We want to educate two kinds of people: “I” people with very deep knowledge in some specific areas, and “T” people who have deep knowledge combined with broad understanding and experience of multidisciplinary work.

So that means that we would need to invest in certain areas of research where we want to be the top of the world, and this would be the “I” side of the development. But we would also be establishing structures and programmes – M.A. programmes, research programmes, business programmes – which are interdisciplinary, and bring resources and knowledge together from the three universities. Interdisciplinarity is the big beef here where the big opportunities that we are excited about.


So you would still come out of this university with a major in either design or engineering or business, but you would also have a good understanding of the two other fields…

That would probably be the case in the beginning. We have learned in our interdisciplinary programmes like International Design Business Management (IDBM) that it is important for people to have a core identity that is built around technology or business or design. What we need to do is give these people capabilities to work in a interdisciplinary way, to understand the thinking of the other members of the team, and to work co-creatively.


Working co-creatively?

One important issue in future development is that problems are complex and to solve them you need to bring together knowledge from many different areas. People now need to have the capability to co-create something, as opposed to the past where somebody could manage the whole process alone.

We would have interdisciplinary research programmes and interdisciplinary M.A. programmes. In fact we already have started with some and they have been very successful, including the ‘International Design Business Management’ (IDBM) programme and the ‘Helsinki School of Creative Entrepreneurship’ (HSCE).

They are both based on bringing together people from the three different disciplines and making them work together with industry.

These programmes have been successful in terms of student feedback and feedback from industry. We are now building more similar programs on product development, innovation learning, and innovation research.


Am I understanding correctly that the entire technology university, the entire business school, and the entire design university are going to merge into this Innovation University?

Yes, there is not going to be an independent business, design or technology university anymore. It’s going to be totally merged and the new University will consist of the schools: a business school, a technology and engineering school and a school of art and design, all within one university. So it’s a full merger of three - at the moment independent - universities and that is the difficult thing in this case.


I can imagine it must have been quite a challenge.

It was. Of course there are many people, both inside and outside, who are suspicious of this development, but the ones that are really excited about this, are the students. They see it as a dramatic expansion of their opportunities for learning and studying. They will be able to study in a new kind of learning environment.

There are also many professors who see that knowledge from different disciplines has to be combined, including perhaps in the future also from social and cognitive sciences, in order to build a full innovation process.


Are you planning to integrate later on the University Departments of Social Sciences and Cognitive Sciences as well into the Innovation University?

No, they will not be merged with the Innovation University, but we have programmes they are involved with. Cognitive psychology is already an important part in some of our programmes. So this interdisciplinary approach will expand beyond business, design, and technology, but these three remain the core of it all. We will not put everything together. That would be a bit too difficult. But the experience of bringing these areas together has been very positive and has created great enthusiasm and interest to go forward. People see it as a great opportunity.


Is this going to be an international university with English language programmes so foreign students can come as well?

Of course. It’s not a Finnish University, a monastery. It will be highly international. Already one fifth of my students are foreigners. This has grown rapidly, so some time in the future the teaching language will be English and all the programmes will be in English. Already most of the programmes in the University of Art and Design are in English. There will be much more foreign students and much more foreign professors working within the Innovation University.


What are some of the themes that you would like to focus on?

One of the themes will definitively be innovation research and innovation education. We are in a middle of a paradigm shift in innovation thinking and management and we want to be a leader in that area. What that will mean in practice is still on the drawing board. Another theme will be product development. We have a project called ‘Design Factory’, which will be an interactive learning environment with extensive technical facilities to support product development. It will contain rapid prototyping facilities and other kinds of machinery in order to make real things. It will be a very practice based learning process. It is our experience that this is the best way to bring people together, to build a learning process, to test ideas and to demonstrate them. You have to demonstrate your ideas or you will die off.

The Design Factory would also involve corporate R&D groups, and perhaps also foreign universities and start-up companies. The Design Factory will not just be an integrated environment of the three original universities, but would also involve companies that want to collaborate with us.


How many students are currently in those three universities?

22,000 students.


So the Design Factory would need to be quite big then…

It will not be for all of them, but yes, hundreds of people will be working within that environment. At the moment it is a concept that has already been tested on a smaller scale and now we are planning to expand it and make it into a bigger project by including other actors than the universities themselves.


How would you then get the other students involved in practice-based learning?

There will be similar structures being built within the Innovation University when we get a little bit further. This is something that is closely related to our past experience. The Innovation Institute is another environment that we are planning and there will be others built around different themes and topics. There are also plans for other new institutes like the ‘Learning Lab’ (new learning innovations) and labs on the application of new materials and on media convergence. But we are just at the beginning of our plans.


What does the Innovation Institute do?

It deals with strategic innovation research, research about innovation environments, innovation processes and innovation development. It will explore the whole question of how to create favourable conditions for innovation activity. It can be studying macro-level issues concerning regions, or cities, or parts of cities, but can also try to better understand how innovations are born or created.

The Innovation Institute involves a very different type of activity than for instance the Design Factory, where people are doing real things in product development. They are linked to each other, as they are both closely related to the question of innovation. And there will be others, bringing together nanotechnology, design and business, or digital technology, content creation and new business models.

There will be several “factories” or institutions built around these areas but we are not so far yet. The researchers in nanotechnology are discussing the development of haptic user interfaces. In order to develop those, design and narrative knowledge is needed, as well as an understanding of interactivity and the development of business models. In fact, the whole digital or media world is something that will be a strong leg of what we will do, but we have not come so far yet that all the concepts are developed in detail.

But we can say that the Innovation University will focus on areas such as nanotechnologies, material sciences, media, digital technologies and product development, the Design Factory, and innovation research. We are still at the beginning of the planning and have not yet brought together the thousands of researchers and students to explore the possibilities.


To what extent has Nokia been involved all this?

They are involved in planning and supporting the development and there will certainly be a focus on mobile devices as well. The whole technology industry sector in Finland has been supporting this project very strongly. It is great that universities and industry are working so closely together in planning and implementing the project.


Do you know of similar approaches in other countries?

There is the initiative in the UK [“Design London”] which is based on the Cox Report, that suggested that clusters of centres of excellence of design, business and technology should be established in the UK. The RCA-Imperial College project is the first of them.

There is also the D-School in Stanford of Tom Kelley and Bill Moggridge. Beyond that I don’t know anything that is of a similar nature.

Everybody talks about interdisciplinarity and collaboration, but often that means just a half day or one day course, which really is a different issue than trying to bring people together in a long learning process of a couple of years.

The Cox Report used as one of the examples a programme that we have been running for twelve years.

I am sure that once this new University will be operational, there will be similar developments in other countries. I will be talking about this in Korea in a few weeks time and in other countries too. There is interest and something will definitely be happening in other parts of the world, but it is not always so easy bring all these entities together. That is the tricky part.


As a first and ambitious mover, you are definitely going to inspire a lot of people.

It has of course major national significance. But if you look at it from the point of view of design, it means that design is given a much bigger role in education, research and national development through this kind of initiative that it ever has had. Design will become a major part of innovation development and not just an activity related to the creation of beauty to the society. Design is put in the centre of development and is at the heart of the paradigm shift from technology-driven development to human-centred development.