Passion and Professionalism
From the Executive Director There would be no Finnish-American Fulbright program today, if it weren’t for partnerships. The program began from the partnership between the two governments, which continues as its bedrock. During the past decade, however, the program has gone through a major transformation, and the partnerships and collaboration have grown far and beyond the governmental ones. Today the FinnishAmerican program is among the largest in Europe with 89 grantees this year. This growth is thanks to the nearly 30 long-term partnership agreements that we have with higher education institutions, foundations, and organizations on both sides of the Atlantic. Today, in essence, the government allocations help fund the Center’s infrastructure, while the partnerships help fund the grants. The collaborative agreements have allowed the Finnish program to grow despite the challenging trends of global economy and public funding for higher education and exchanges in both of our countries. And the Center intends to grow further (p. 22). The Fulbright Center’s newest partnership agreement was signed recently with Hanken, the Swedishlanguage business university in Finland, creating the Fulbright-Hanken Distinguished Chair in Business and Economics (p. 4). The Fulbright program in Finland now prides itself with four Distinguished Chairs. In the United States, we are so pleased to announce the Friends of Fulbright Finland Alumni Enrichment Award, funded entirely from an endowment created by alumni donations. This new grant was announced in May at our Friends of Fulbright Finland alumni event at the USS Constitution Museum in Boston (p. 20). We are privileged to have the event’s keynote speaker, our distinguished alumnus Dr. Bengt Holmström, Paul A. Samuelson Professor of Economics at MIT in the United States, and Member of the Aalto University Board in Finland, as the invited columnist of this issue (p. 2). To further underline the importance we place on partnerships and collaboration, the Fulbright Center is pleased to introduce its Internationalization Services (p. 10). With its Speaker Program, national seminars, U.S. Study Tours, dialogues and roundtable series, the Center strives to help Finnish and U.S. institutions create linkages and develop long-term cooperation, tackle existing obstacles in transatlantic mobility, and support the internationalization of education and research in Finland. Enjoy “Partnerships” in this Spring 2015 issue of the Fulbright Center News! Terhi Mölsä
Exchanges, networks and innovation are integrally connected. Seeing that something is possible and it can be done has a great value and significant impact. International scholarly exchanges such as ASLA-Fulbright offer this very opportunity. Exchanges open up a window to benchmark from best practices and to see with one’s own eyes how things are done by others. This is important for the sake of both knowledge as well as motivation. A common misconception about innovation is that it somehow comes from within. In reality, all innovation begins with imitation. You first need to go out to see how others do things, learn from them as much as possible, and then you go back and adapt what you have learnt to your own special circumstances, and then you do it all better. That is how innovations come about. One of the fundamental values of international exchanges is that, in essence, it provides you with an opportunity for imitation, and consequently for innovation. It is not possible to overestimate the importance of networks. We have many levels and many kinds of networks from family and friends to distant acquaintances, both in the personal and business contexts. All of them can be important. But one does not always realize that the most valuable parts of your network are often what are called the “weak links”. Not the people that are closest to you, nor those who are very distant. But rather the middle level, the people you communicate with only periodically. These “weak links” in the network can actually turn out to be the most powerful and the most valuable, for example, in helping to secure a new job or offering an invaluable new connection helping your research break into new grounds. Networking has grown enormously valuable in recent years particularly because of the internet. We need to do much more networking as we go forward. But it is not helpful to do it randomly. It needs to have some kind of a structure. And this is what is provided for instance by Fulbright and its alumni. I also want to point out the connection between networking and globalization and the creation of community—people coming together outside the governments, taking the initiative to do something for a local group or
for the broader society. The ASLAFulbright program fits perfectly with this idea, since it is essentially an independent entity. Although it has government connections from both sides, in the end it thrives on individuals organizing themselves and being motivated by a common project. In this respect the United States is ahead of Finland, which may have less of a tradition in this kind of activity. However, right now in Finland we are seeing much more self-organized groups coming together and solving their own problems in diverse ways, also including giving money to various charities. The advice I give to students both at MIT and at Aalto University is that when you see that something needs to be done, go do it. For example, at Aalto a group of students asked the question: why isn’t Aalto doing anything for entrepreneurship? And in an inspired moment my answer to them was: has anyone prevented you from doing something? And that was all I really needed to say. They understood right away that if they strive to be entrepreneurs, they cannot wait for somebody to come and organize it for them. The best way to become an entrepreneur is just to go and do it. And in fact, it was the collaboration with students at MIT that resulted in the Aalto students seeing what was possible. I was an ASLA grantee myself and have seen the impact of exchanges. And the impact continues. Students came to talk with me, and that is worth millions in the long run, because these small steps in these small groups, taking concrete initiatives are crucially influential. This is especially if they are done with both passion and professionalism. The Fulbright Center has been running its programs with both.
The column is an abbreviated version of Dr. Holmström’s remarks at the Friends of Fulbright Finland alumni event at the USS Constitution Museum in Boston on May 30, 2015 (see page 20).
Dr. Bengt Holmström Paul A. Samuelson Professor of Economics at MIT Member of the Aalto University Board ASLA-Fulbright grantee to Stanford University in 1974