First and foremost we should congratulate Professor John Ågren and the MSE Department for the new research contract with SSF. The title of the funded project is “Sintring av inhomogena strukturer för förbättrad prestanda” and the total project budget is 31 million SEK. Congratulations!

KTH takes now a number of integrated initiatives that go across department and school borders. The funding of those initiatives comes from KTH balanced capital which over the last few years has accumulated a bit more than necessary. The ITM School hosts one of these initiatives – namely the one on Circular economy (CE), a concept which recently has caught a lot of interest because it focuses sustainable development issues in a business context. The European Commission is investing (in a broad sense) remarkably in circular economy (e.g. € 650 million in Horizon 2020 and € 5.5 billion under the structural funds). Essentially, the focus of circular economy is twofold:

1. To close the materials cycle in a business system with reuse and recycling of products, components and materials for increasing resource efficiency and reducing environmental impact.
2. To replace an industrial logic in which the basic principle is that materials and labour are priced, with another logic in which the function and benefit to the customer is the basis for value and pricing.

The KTH (or ITM if you wish) initiative on CE has an overall budget of 22 million SEK if we include the assistant professorship on Resource efficient business models for recycling of materials (one of the 12 prestigious assistant professorships that KTH announced more than a year ago) to which ITM recently has appointed Andreas Feldmann at the Department of Industrial Economics and Management – Congratulations Andreas! The goal of our CE initiative is that KTH during the time of the four-year funding period will establish a centre-like structure with substantial external funding for research and that corresponding education activities have been established.  The initiative includes also the CHE, ABE and CSC Schools but is led and coordinated by ITM.

In my last blog the ITM Core Values were given in Swedish, and an English translation was promised to come, and here it is:

ITM’s Core Values

The ITM School has a value system based on

• democracy, equality, human rights and freedom, free speech and open discussion. Gender equality and rejection of all forms of discrimination raises both the quality of our institution and our working environment, and is therefore an integral part of ITM’s core values.
• equal treatment in terms of rights, conditions, opportunities and obligations, regardless of ethnicity, nationality, gender, gender identity or expression, religion or belief, disability, social background, sexual orientation or age.

Important corner-stones for ITM’s continued development are

• that diversity, equality and equal treatment are important in order to develop ITM as an attractive and successful workplace where everyone is given opportunities to develop and to contribute to good results.
• that education and research can and should contribute to better living conditions and a peaceful society, and meet the requirements of ecological, social and economic sustainability. As part of a leading technical university, the ITM School has a special responsibility to develop the knowledge needed to promote such sustainable development.

Jan Wikander, Dean of School