- eTampere program - Operation of eTampere - Comments
eTampere in the lives of its makers
Those directing eTampere’s sub-programmes each carried out this work alongside their usual tasks. What are the directors’ opinions on the realization of the programme’s aims and its activities in general? Here is a summary of interviews conducted in summer 2005.
- Infocity, Jari Seppälä, Communications Director, City of Tampere
- Information Society Institute ISI, Antti Kasvio, Docent, University of Tampere
Sami Borg, Chairman of the ISI Steering Group, University of Tampere - Technology engine programmes, Hannu Eskola, Professor, Director, Tampere University of Technology Digital Media Institute
- Research & Evaluation Laboratory RELab, Pasi Viitanen, Senior Research Scientist, VTT Industrial Systems
- e-Business Research Center eBRC, Marko Seppä, Project Manager, Tampere University of Technology
- eAccelerator, Pekka Jussila, CEO, Hermia Business Development Ltd
Heidi Huhtamella, Vice CEO, Hermia Business Development Ltd - eTampere programme, Jarmo Viteli, Professor, Director, University of Tampere Hypermedia Laboratory
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The sub-programme’s director, Jari Seppälä, considers the Netti-Nysse internet bus to be the largest single success on the practical level. Most room for improvement was left with the eTampere card.
According to Seppälä, Infocity’s key aims were outlined on a rather general level in eTampere’s original plan: to enhance the service ability of the city’s Information Technology Centre, recruit internet content producers, train the city’s personnel and acquire databases, publishing systems and other software required for online services.
“There have been three dimensions to Infocity’s thinking: to develop the city’s electronic services, to arrange an opportunity for everyone to use them, and to train citizens in their use. Infocity itself has simply been a light coordination and reporting body with no full-time employees. The actual development work has been carried out with roughly the same appropriation that, regardless of Infocity, would have been reserved in the city’s budget for the electrification of services anyway,” Seppälä says.
In Seppälä’s view, eTampere has been a good exercise on the grounds that there hasn’t been a constant need to consider the benefits the projects would provide. Instead it has been possible to test and explore in areas that don’t necessarily lead to anything. In the normal scheme of things, there aren’t necessarily very many opportunities for development work of this nature.
In a joint interview, Director of the Information Society Institute Antti Kasvio and Chairman of ISI’s Steering Group Sami Borg say they have often felt like being caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. On the other hand, there was a desire to raise local research to a high international standard with eTampere, and on the other hand the Information Society Institute was expected to be multidisciplinary and support training and active citizenship. In their view, ISI succeeded reasonably well in achieving balance.
“I believe that many of the prerequisites for multidisciplinary research have significantly improved thanks to the institute,” Borg says.
Borg and Kasvio believe that the institute has had an influence on the raised level of cooperation between the University’s departments, perhaps not quite on the organizational level but between key persons such as professors. Cooperation has also been generated between the University of Tampere and Tampere University of Technology. International cooperation has emerged in the EU framework.
According to Borg and Kasvio, the main cause of frustration during the institute’s five-year term has been a ‘Waiting for Godot’ like atmosphere.
“We would have wanted to hire a small team to properly paint a full-length picture of the Finnish knowledge society, but the funding wasn’t quite there. A plus side has been the accumulated networking capital.”
“The cooperation of universities with companies shouldn’t mean that a university produces a new idea and a commercial venture then quickly turns it into a product. The best thing a university has to offer is interesting education based on good research, and in the long term this is precisely the purpose that the institute’s far-reaching activities will serve,” they conclude.
When the engine programmes kicked off, the sub-programme’s director Hannu Eskola was unable to anticipate the importance of networks. They are in his view ultimately what will be left of the engine programmes after the conclusion of eTampere.
“The five specialty fields of the engine programmes were user interfaces, neoreality, adaptive software components, information perception and broadband data communications. The activities have been based simply on the fact that technological expertise accumulates through research. With the city’s seed funding, programme managers have been hired to prepare research projects and acquire research funding,” describes Eskola of the sub-programme’s activity.
He believes one of the most notable single results is the Finnish office of W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium.
According to Eskola, a great deal of cooperation was carried out with established companies. Usually cooperation was launched with a research idea presented by researchers to companies. However, from the engine programmes’ perspective, company projects where not a goal in themselves: the essence was to accumulate expertise.
Eskola doesn’t find any general reason for a project’s failure. The acquisition of project funding alone is an aggregate of many chances where everything has to click into place.
Research & Evaluation Laboratory
The sub-programme director, Pasi Viitanen, praises eTampere’s merits in enhancing local networking but points out that sometimes it would be better to focus on actual doing rather than networking.
“The aim has been that when a company, for example, is thinking about launching a new service business, it would be possible to calculate the costs in advance and evaluate the terms on which it would be turned into profitable business. The problem is many sided,” Viitanen describes.
He believes that the fundamental idea of the laboratory, the generation of easy-to-use information technology based solutions, has remained even though the research focus has switched from consumer services to business services.
“There’s an increased awareness of the kind of competences we have in Tampere and it has been a positive surprise, at least to myself, to see how many activities there are here. On the other hand, there are surprisingly many players in the same field here who don’t have any mutual cooperation,” Viitanen estimates.
e-Business Research Center eBRC
The sub-programme’s director, Marko Seppä, estimates that the delivery of the research centre as part of the eTampere programme was not completely painless: the mother and father may have had different views as to how the offspring should be. He is nevertheless quite pleased with what has been achieved in the space of five years. The most visible accomplishment is the only annual conference in business economics in Finland, the e-Business Research Forum.
“In practice the activities have been based on the quantitative aim set by the funders, a project portfolio of a hundred million marks, that is 16.8 million euros. All achievements have stemmed from the matchmaker model between business, university and government – BUG – launched by us, i.e. border-crossing networking and partnership,” Seppä says.
According to Seppä, the sub-programme’s biggest disappointment may well be the attempt to establish a secondary trade name shared by the two universities, a process which set off humbly and without presumption but in some people’s eyes perhaps with too much confidence. Disappointment is also associated with the research conference as only a small number of professors and researchers in business economics in Tampere have wanted or been able to utilize the conference practically brought to their doorstep.
“At first there were a huge number of investors and even foreign money, large seed funds on the market. But they were pulled down rather quickly. Many made a decision to postpone investment in information technology for five years. The original method of operation, that is to invite funders to the negotiation table, didn’t work anymore when there were no more funders,” Pekka Jussila and Heidi Huhtamella reflect. Still, the accelerator’s fundamental idea, to direct growth stages and seek partnerships in various funding rounds, has remained.
“The establishment of a seed fund was an exceptional event because the basic mantra in finance is that private investors will not fund seed-stage activity. Because it is so susceptible to risk, it is left to the state. But we managed to draw in quite a lot of purely private money and successful entrepreneurs for the project.”
Networks on many levels have emerged for eAccelerator too. Local, Tampere-based players have together outlined the challenges for the development of new business, and Jussila and Huhtamella believe that they have succeeded in building credibility in the eyes of industry.
“On the national level we have participated in the development of business development activities, the building of new funding systems and the renewal of the entire science park phenomenon for the part of business development,” they say. International cooperation has been built with the Nordic countries, the EU and the United States, among others.
In Huhtamella and Jussila’s view, cooperation between business life and the research world could have been closer. They believe that companies expected the public sector – i.e. the City of Tampere – to open up more with eTampere, but in the end there weren’t so many hooks to latch on to.
In the opinion of Director of the eTampere programme Jarmo Viteli, one of eTampere’s most significant achievements has been the strengthening of the citizen sector.
“The global economy also caught many Finns unprepared. During the strong, fast paced years we were blinded by the illusion that we were world’s number one, and now it has been revealed that we are actually just average appliers.”
In Viteli’s view, the city should open more to development work. Companies should be a little bit more broadminded and consider how cooperation would strengthen basic business even if immediate revenue wouldn’t necessarily be achievable from single projects. Universities should understand their own role and choose their areas of focus: if you conduct basic research, you operate on the terms of basic research, and if you conduct applied research, you operate on the terms of applied research.
“Networking is a necessary prerequisite for success. Only after this has been realized is it possible to start looking for actual forms of activity. With eTampere we have learned that the more you give to networks, the more you gain from them.”
Viteli says there is now a need for strong policies and resources for the development of technology as well as service production and methods of operation.
“Knowledge society is not discussed so much anymore around the world, it has been replaced by ubiquitous information and communication technology in which there is currently enormous investment particularly in Japan and South Korea.”
“A research project should not produce the anticipated results, it should produce results that correspond to reality. Even though a development project wouldn’t go quite according to expectations, it doesn’t mean that the project has failed if something has been learned from it.”
According to Viteli, the time of great narratives and hype is over as technology is now applied in people’s daily lives and at work. As information technology has become commonplace, it is opportune to drop the little e away from eTampere, too.