Lessons learned from FITech Turku, a 18 million euros university collaboration project to complement the regional demand for Master degree engineers

This Innovative Practice Full Paper presents a nationwide university collaboration project to complement regional demand for Master degree engineers. Technology industry with sufficient ability and investment in research, development and innovation is in the core of economic growth and success at both national and regional level. Higher education institutions should produce the needed new engineering professionals and serve as platforms for university-industry collaboration in research and innovation. Due to phenomena such as globalisation of industrial activities and growing demand for sustainable energy solutions, the regional development of different technology industry sectors, e.g. marine technology, telecommunications and battery technologies, can take diverting directions and change the need for skillsets of new engineers. While innovation activity of a local higher education institution can on long term provide the platform for new growth businesses, investment-heavy industries often have other drivers for the location of their activities. Establishing new degree programs, or even further, new educational institutions, contains its potential challenges, financial and in availability of qualified researchers, teachers and students. Furthermore, these efforts are not sufficiently fast to address the fairly rapid changes in the need for the workforce. FITech (Finnish Institute of Technology) has been a five year project to address the demand of qualified engineers in Southwestern Finland, the region with the fastest growing technology industry in the country. The project consortium contains the seven Finnish universities providing engineering education, with the budget for the 5-year project period (from 2017 to 2021) being 18 million euros, from which 70% is funded by the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture, and the 30% is covered by the universities themselves, This paper analyzes the quantitative (e.g. master thesis elaborated in companies in the region, plans and agreements to take the collaboration forward after the funded project period) of the project. In addition to reflect upon the follow up, three new education projects (FITech ICT, FITech Energy Storage and FITech 5G), materialized from the collaboration within FITech consortium, are introduced. The discussion summarizes the detected challenges and areas for improvement to enhance the success of such systematic university collaboration at a national scale.