Profitable year 2019 – and an eye to the future
Year 2019 was the first actual year of operation for the Tampere Universities community. Tampere University of Applied Sciences’ strategy was updated while Tampere University did its strategy work. The strategic definitions of policy were prepared by the higher education community and based on them TAMK defined its actual critical success factors and strategic objectives.
The starting point of our new strategy is that TAMK is a growing university of applied sciences in Finland during this decade. We especially invest in developing our international activities and strengthening our RDI. In addition, we are steadily growing the number of our degree education places in accordance with the national definitions of policy, which has already shown as a clear growth in the past two years.
Finnish education competence interests internationally. Last year TAMK’s education export grew strongly, especially the demand for pedagogical education. The largest individual agreement was made on organisation of nursing education in Kenya.
TAMK’s research, development and innovation project base grew to almost 20 million euros. It was especially important for future profiling that we received strategic funding for two projects from the Ministry of Education and Culture. One concerns development of genomic data application and the other application of industrial internet in production and business life. In these fields TAMK will strengthen its operation and continuously search for new focus areas which are important development targets for our society.
TAMK’s year 2019 was operationally profitable and financially we succeeded in keeping our financial statements positive by means of investment returns.
At the time of writing the coronavirus situation has closed the doors of almost all higher education institutions in Europe and Finland. They operate remotely as TAMK. Remote education has started well but especially international activities and RDI projects are facing significant challenges. The exceptional conditions challenge us to fight the coronavirus but also develop our operations towards wider use of remote work even permanently.
I want to thank our students, staff and interest groups for the profitable year and I wish you strength and health to face the exceptional challenges of the ongoing year.
Tampere, 23 March 2020
Markku Lahtinen
President and CEO
Read also: President Markku Lahtinen will leave TAMK at the end of the year