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

Two weeks ago ITM handed in our application for a new BSc in Engineering program to the Faculty council. This new program within the area of industrial maintenance and reliability is the second new program to be established as a result of our extensive developments in Södertälje. The final naming of the program is not decided yet but is investigated by an external consultancy bureau through an extensive survey to high-school students in Sweden. The idea is of course to find a name which attracts youngsters – both women and men – and which describes the program content in a fair and true way.

Another exciting development is the establishment of a new type applied research centre in cooperation with Fraunhofer in Germany and RISE – Research Institutes of Sweden. This new centre will initially be hosted by the Department of Production Engineering but is supposed to create links also to other departments of ITM. The short name is PMH Application Lab and the full name is Powertrain Manufacturing for Heavy Vehicles Application Lab. The basic idea is to engage with Fraunhofer and RISE to establish an applied research centre similar to how Fraunhofer operates in Germany with close links and extensive mobility between the institute and the hosting university. We also believe that this centre will strengthen our position as a European research partner. The particular topic of powertrain manufacturing is of course related to the fact that the Mälardalen region represents about 10% of the total world-wide production of heavy vehicle powertrains.

As announced in my last blog, ITM held last week the annual leadership conference with about 50 participants. Among a number of interesting topics the whole leadership agreed on the ITM basic values. These values are given below (in Swedish) and will soon be translated also to English and published on our intranet.

ITM:s värdegrund

ITM har en värdegrund baserad på

• demokrati, människors lika värde, mänskliga fri- och rättigheter samt en fri och öppen diskussion. Jämställdhet mellan kvinnor och män samt avståndstagande från alla former av diskriminering är både en kvalitetsfråga och en arbetsmiljöfråga, och därmed en självklar del av ITM:s värdegrund.
• likabehandling när det gäller rättigheter, villkor, möjligheter och skyldigheter oavsett etnisk tillhörighet, nationalitet, kön, könsidentitet eller könsuttryck, religion eller annan trosuppfattning, funktionsnedsättning, social bakgrund, sexuell läggning eller ålder.

En viktig utgångspunkt för ITM:s fortsatta utveckling är

• övertygelsen att mångfald, jämställdhet och likabehandling är viktigt för att utveckla ITM till en attraktiv och framgångsrik arbetsplats där alla ges förutsättningar att utvecklas och bidra till goda resultat.
• övertygelsen att utbildning och forskning kan och ska bidra till bättre levnadsbetingelser och till en fredlig samhällsutveckling som uppfyller kraven om ekologisk, social och ekonomisk hållbarhet. Som ingående i ett tekniskt universitet har ITM ett särskilt ansvar för att utveckla kunskap som behövs för att främja en sådan hållbar utveckling.

/Jan Wikander, Dean of School

I was about to dedicate this blog piece to the fact that the team behind the development of our campus in Södertälje will reach a major milestone this week, but I did not need to because our president has already highlighted it! See the president’s letter. A few names are mentioned in the weekly president’s letter but all who have been somehow involved in the developments – not the least the staff members of TMT – should feel that they are part of the timely and professional but sometimes rather challenging process of reaching the first major milestone. There are more milestones to come, so let us continue the development in the same constructive and professional manner, and let us have fun while doing it!

Next year, the KTH main campus will celebrate its 100 year anniversary. As part of the celebrations KTH is now looking for major or exciting or unusual events or happenings that will take place during 2017, and hence candidates for being part of the celebrations. If you know about such things that are worth celebrating please inform Annika Lilja. Besides the KTH celebrations, ITM will in 2017 also celebrate the birth and inauguration of the new campus in Södertälje.

The annual ITM leadership conference takes place March 17-18. This year the conference gathers unit leaders, directors of studies, doctoral program directors, centre/SFO managers, impact leader, heads of department, administrative function managers, and school management. Altogether we will be around 50 people concentrating on issues of strategic importance for developing our academic environment, for improving quality, and for discussing longer term strategies towards the societal impact that we would like to see. One core topic this year will be ITM core values, gender equality, diversity and equal treatment.

Not all KTH schools produce an annual activity report, but ITM does. From last year we also decided to use the annual report more actively as an instrument for our external communications. Most importantly we distribute it to PhD and faculty alumni, but also to strategic partners and funding bodies. Please inform ITM Communication with name and address to external people that you think are of strategic importance to your academic activities.

Last but not least, if you are an ITM PhD student, don’t forget to register for ITM PhD candidate conference 2016.

Jan Wikander, Dean

When approaching a new year, each of the KTH schools signs a contract with our rector about the next year’s activities. On the educational side our mission is rather stable from year to year in terms of number new students and target numbers for graduations. For 2016 there is one major new activity, namely the start-up of the new BSc/MSc program on Industrial engineering and sustainability. The new program will be hosted by our campus in Södertälje. Associate professor Pernilla Ulfvengren has been appointed as program manager. Take a look at the program.

On the research side the operations contract is subject to more of “negotiations” about new research initiatives and new faculty positions which the different ITM departments put forward. If approved, new initiatives are usually funded for a period of two to five years. The process is roughly as follows;

• Our rector announces the amount of financial resources that are available for new initiatives for the coming year and which the central priorities are. The total amount is determined on the one hand by any changes in the resources allocated to KTH from the ministry of education and on the other hand by the amount set free by earlier initiatives that end. For 2016 45 MSEK where available for the whole of KTH.
• The ITM departments propose to the School which new initiatives they would like to see. Based on these proposals a rather transparent and open discussion and prioritization is taking place in the ITM management group. After this, a final prioritized list is defined as the ITM proposal to the rector. For 2016 ITM submitted a list with 17 different initiatives amounting to 10.3 MSEK for 2016 and 48.8 MSEK for the period 2016-2020.
• The rector’s office (rector, dean, accounting….) then goes through proposals from all the schools and comes back with a proposed operations contract for each school. What the rector proposed for ITM for 2016 is an exception in the sense that the proposal goes beyond what we expected. The allocation in the contract is 9.9 MSEK for 2016 and 41.1 MSEK for the period 2016-2020.

The list of funded initiatives is:

/Jan Wikander, Dean of School

Efficient internal communication is always a challenge. Too much information via inadequate channels are at the risk of being perceived only as disturbance. At the same time there is a challenge to keep the information flow going and to make sure that the information is up-to-date. Maybe the most difficult part is to guarantee that key information within a particular part of our operations, actually reaches the staff members that depend on having that information on time. This blog from the ITM management is to be kept up-to-date on a weekly basis covering general KTH and ITM news and up-dates. But more importantly key updates on basic education, research education, faculty development and administration will be provided directly by the persons in charge at the ITM level.

Impact on society should be seen as the ultimate goal of academic activities. A rather recent activity at KTH is focused both highlighting and improving our impact on society. In line with this, each KTH school has nominated a staff member to be coordinating the impact improvement work within the school but also at KTH at large by networking within the whole group of school coordinators. If you have ideas on this topic or good impact examples from you group or unit please take a contact with the ITM impact coordinator Hatef Madani at the department Energy technology.

Jan Wikander, Dean of School