2023-12-21: The autumn of 2023 at Chalmers has been intense – as it usually is, and as it should be at a technical university which is full of passionate people. A myriad of events, hard efforts, decisions and insights.
But the myriad doesn’t mean chaos. We can see patterns. For me, as a relatively new President, the most important perspective is to see how everything we do relates to our long-term goal of being a world-class technical university by 2041, and the strategy we have adopted to get there.
If you were to summarise the autumn from my perspective, you could therefore say that the focus has been on creating the right conditions for the implementation of our long-term strategy.
This has been a driving force, for example, when we have worked with the processes involved in recruitment and promotion. Becoming even better at attracting, recruiting and retaining talent is a crucial part of making future Chalmers even better than it is today. This is something we started during the autumn and which will intensify after the turn of the year.
You can see the recruitments and the establishment of two Deputy Presidents for Chalmers in the same way That too, are changes that we are making in order to create the right conditions for implementing the strategy.
As you may be aware, these Deputy Presidents will each be responsible for a complementary dimension of the environment that is Chalmers. One in respect to academic excellence and the other to equality and leadership. These are big areas. Broad strategic assignments that deal with the entire business, rather than singular processes or specific deliveries. It will be Professors Susanne Aalto and Maria Elmquist who will step into Chalmers’ top management, and thus the entire function of the President will be updated which will provide additional energy and a clear direction.
I would also like to mention Chalmers Next Labs AB in this context, our newest company, formed and started in 2023 as a direct consequence of how we decided to work with the group structure in line with our long-term strategy. This means that we can expand in terms of research-related development – we can be responsive to the needs of society and industry – but the expansion lies outside the faculty. In this way, we safeguard the faculty’s profoundly academic character and the direction we have embarked on, which will create less project dependence and more long-term conditions in order to build excellence. Now they are in full swing with setting up the quantum test bed that means cutting-edge research knowledge will be made available to the society around us. More projects are about to be launched.
Clearly linked to our long-term strategy is also the decision on the focus of the educational programmes which was made in late autumn. It is about being able to offer education of the highest quality and run the educational programmes in an efficient way, where each program has its own distinct character. In the long term, the programmes will be somewhat fewer but larger. The number of courses will also be reduced slightly, while we will increase the number of full-time students. Finding the right forms and ways of working here is about concretising the two fundamental aspects of our long-term strategy: to be able to act proactively to the needs of society, i.e. to increase the relevant number of students and; to build academic excellence, which requires us to create long-term conditions and concentrate resources to a faculty that must then be limited in size.
The steps we need to take in the organisation are many, but the direction is the same: by taking one step at a time, we build the right conditions in order to implement our long-term strategy.
Martin Nilsson Jacobi, President and CEO of Chalmers University of Technology
Under the headline "President’s perspective" the President and CEO for Chalmers University of Technology, shares his reflections on current topics that concern education, research and utilisation.