PROFESSOR DYLAN JONES-EVANS

This week, I have returned to Finland and, more specifically, the city of Turku where I am a visiting professor at the university. The occasion is the 35th European conference in entrepreneurship research which, as I was at the fourth event in Durham back in 1990, makes me feel extremely old. Of course, after having to avoid such gatherings for so long, it’s been wonderful to finally catch up with colleagues and friends to  discuss, face to face, some of the latest studies in my chosen field. It’s also given me an opportunity to find out what has been happening to the Finnish economy - one of the most competitive in the World - after the Covid-19 pandemic and especially the future prospects for entrepreneurship in this fantastic country. The good news for Finland is that according to its latest SME Barometer (which provides a comprehensive picture of Finnish small and medium sized firms’ perceptions of the economy - the predictions are optimistic after the downturn of last year. Th...

Last week, I attended a conference organised by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to examine the future of manufacturing . It was a timely event, as I am currently undertaking research into the development of advanced manufacturing in Finland during the last thirty lessons and the lessons that other small economies can take from this experience. We heard from a range of experts in the field, including Professor Martin Schmidt of MIT, who has been advising President Obama on a new emphasis on manufacturing within the US economy . The report from his review is fascinating, mainly because of the differences in the philosophy regarding economic development as compared to most parts of Europe . In fact, the conclusions to the report to ensure American leadership in advanced manufacturing comprehensively rejected a picking winners policy, either in terms of individual companies or specific sectors. Instead, it proposed pursuing an innovation policy for advanced manufa...

Having been in Finland for the past few days,  I managed to catch up with a former flatmate from Dublin, Jonne Saivosalmi, who now runs a company called Place Marketing , a media company that focus on promoting towns and regions in Finland. Some of the work they do is groundbreaking and I would love to see them pitch for work in Wales, especially given their quirky and innovative approach which is a million miles away from the advertising usually procured by Welsh organisations. Take, for example, their campaign to promote higher education to overseas students in Oulu in Northern Finland.  Not an easy sell, I can assure you, but they bring it off perfectly for their target market as the videos below demonstrate. 1. Jason from Oulu on Vimeo . Yu-hsuan from Oulu on Vimeo . Gisbert from Oulu on Vimeo . Shanila from Oulu on Vimeo .

Last week, I spent some time in Finland working on number of joint projects that have been developed between Turku University, where I have a visiting professorship, and the Global Academy. During my week there, I had the opportunity to visit Helsinki and the new academic institution known as Aalto University. It was a fortuitous visit, given that Aalto University was created out of a merger, two years ago, between three specialist academic institutions, namely the University of Art and Design Helsinki (1,900 students), the Helsinki University of Technology (14,000 students) and the Helsinki School of Economics (3,200 students). As such, it seems a relevant case study to examine the impact of university mergers that, as most of you are aware, are seen as the panacea to some of the challenges facing Welsh Higher Education. Talking to various individuals, it became clear that the first issue that was important in terms of the Aalto merger was that it had a specific vision that was ...

Given my love for all things Finnish, this is one new programme that policymakers could and should be emulating. The Aalto Venture Garage , part of the newly formed Aalto University, is a co-working space and seed accelerator in the Nordics and Baltics, providing a free 700m open space for hackers and startups. It operates from a big industrial hall whose interiors have been optimised for entrepreneurs to work together. Shipping containers have also been brought in to create extra rooms, with even their roofs being transformed into office space, with stairs leading to the top and onto a maze of chairs and tables. Its programmes include the Startup Sauna, which claims to be the leading open sourced seed accelerator for early-stage startups in Northern Europe and Russia. Startup Sauna pushes the selected startups develop to a stage where they are ready to take over the international markets, using coaching from some of the region’s best serial entrepreneurs, investors and other prof...

There is a great debate going on about the state of education in Wales not only at the university level, but also at primary and secondary levels as well. As many have pointed out, there seems to be one particular country that Wales could learn from and that is Finland, the international trailblazer in the field of education. As a regular visitor to Finland for the past 15 years, I have experienced, at first hand, the high quality of university student coming through the system. Yet, it is only recently that other nations have begun to sit up and take notice of what is going on. One excellent point of reference for the so-called Finnish Way is the work of   Pasi Sahlberg . His writing and lectures on this subject are worth having a look at, such as this presentation on what a Canadian province can learn from Finland  in the field of education. Essentially, Sahlberg argues that the rest of the World is trailing Finland in five key areas of education, na...