Filling an engineering specialist void: FITech University Network - a cooperative education initiative to support the growth of Southwestern Finland

Technology industry with sufficient ability and investment in research, development and innovation is the core of successful growth of several national economies. Higher education institutions need to provide a wide range of engineers with an increasing level of cross-disciplinary skills. An active, local presence of a university providing degree programs and research in technology has a strong link with the volume and development of the technology industry in the region. While modern technologies, especially information and communication technology (ICT), allow research and development activities to be independent of the location, other sectors of technology industry, such as maritime industry, require significant investments in physical facilities, bound to the region. Governments face two main challenges to maintain their industry's engineering competitiveness: (1) to prepare engineering graduates across expanding ranges of skills and knowledge, and (2) to provide the engineers in the regions where these skills are needed. Southwestern Finland is a region with the fastest growing technology industry in the country. Without a university with a full range of opportunities for academic engineering education in the region, there is an increasing number of job openings that cannot be filled. In Finland, students in engineering connect with the industry already during their studies and, after graduation, tend to stay in the region where they studied. To expose engineering students to the challenges of Southwestern Finland without creating new permanent higher education engineering structures in the region, the Finnish government in 2017 launched FITech, a 5-year project including all the seven Finnish universities offering engineering education. The purpose of FITech is to offer a nationwide cooperative solution to coordinate and provide engineering education and research in all domains of engineering to support the growth of Southwestern Finland region. This paper introduces the foundations and objectives of FITech and using the early indications of its results suggests a framework to evaluate the success of this complex nationwide project. Preliminary outcomes from the perspective of the University of Turku, one of the seven FITech partners, utilizing an adapted version of Hevner et al design science framework, show the challenges in achieving sufficient regional impact by the FITech approach and provide guidance for its ongoing development and implementation.