Industry, education development, and research projects

2023-2026: “Strengthening DEI in Education and SME Management” (DEI4SME)

Project number 2023-1-FI01-KA220-HED-000166837. (400 000 EUR/ 122 500 EUR)

Leading DEI4SME – an Erasmus+ project co-funded by the European Union, uniting six partner organisations from Finland, Germany, Austria, and Lithuania for the mission to enable DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) in business and business education.

Project main goals:

• Higher Education Institutions will receive digital education infrastructure to develop graduates’ skills needed to lead change toward social responsibility in SMEs.
• SMEs will receive a digital tool to plan, implement, and report measurable DEI activities in line with the ESG requirements in the EU.
• The project will support employment of multiple underrepresented groups, especially students with diverse backgrounds, because SMEs will develop competencies in and awareness of the DEI management.

Read more: https://dei4sme.eu/

The project outcomes have included:

• • Leading international hackathon – recognized by UN Global Compact & PRME
  • Developing and publishing large number of teaching cases
  • Creating a digital tool for CSR management in SMEs

(400 000 EUR in total, out of which 122 500 EUR granted for the University of Vaasa) granted by ERASMUS+ (The EU project within the KA220-HED – Cooperation partnerships in higher education).

Leading a project in which University of Vaasa is in the consortium among Kaunas University of Technology (Lithuania), IHK- PROJEKTGESELLSCHAFT MBH (Germany), Wirtschaftskammer Steiermark (Austria), OY Merinova AB (Finland), and E.N.T.E.R. GMBH (Austria).

 

2023-2026:  “Education for sustainable internationalization of a firm with the TFK2023”

Leading a project for developing the Double Degree and other educational collaborations between the University of Vaasa, Finland, and Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP), Peru. 59 200 EUR granted by TFK 2023, Team Finland Knowledge programme, Finnish National Agency of Education.

The project comprises three activities:

• developing and continuously running a joint course with the Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) activity,
• short-term mobilities of faculty and students (from the University of Vaasa to the PUCP, and from the PUCP to the University of Vaasa), and
• development of double-degree between the institutions participating in the project.

Read reflections from the project here: https://blogs.uwasa.fi/tfk2023atunivaasa/

 

2021 – 2022: “Digital solutions for strategy implementation”

(14 000 EUR).
Leader of the project. Grant for post-doctoral studies, Dr.h.c. Marcus Wallenberg Foundation, Finland

Project Objectives:

• to investigate industry of emerging digital solutions for strategy implementation (SI) in Finland and abroad;
• to reveal how industry of SI apps emerging in Finland could become competitive internationally;
• to uncover challenges of adopting digital SI solutions and design process via which companies could benefit most from cloud applications for SI;
• to design suggestions how Finnish companies could strengthen their competitive advantage by adopting digital SI solutions that are built upon well-established execution methods, such as Hoshin Kanri.