Tampere in the EU

by Dr. Markku Valtonen

Cities play a major role Cin achieving the goals of the Lisbon Strategy. As a result of the innovation and technology resources available to them, towns and cities are engines of growth and employment as well as centres of learning and culture.

Tampere is an excellent example of this kind of city. Throughout its existence, Tampere has attracted new activities which have evolved to enhance local and national welfare. At the beginning, this involved water power and the Russian markets that attracted foreign knowledge, skills and capital and resulted in industrialisation. In recent decades, leading knowledge has been the magnet for many niche areas of mechanical engineering and automation, ICT, bio- and medical sciences, materials. This magnet didn't appear simply by chance.

Its development was a direct result of the city's decision to start investing in education and research in the 1970's. Tampere's two universities and two polytechnic universities of applied science as well as the VTT Research Centre in cooperation with local enterprises have all enabled sustainable growth - a development that Tampere has constantly been catalysing.

When Finland joined the European Union in 1995, Tampere didn't score well in terms of the availability of cohesion funds. As a white spot, Tampere and its neighbouring towns and municipalities decided to focus strongly on locating complementary knowledge centres and actively work with these to seek EU Framework Programme's Thnancing. In a way, we had already started to apply the European Research Area (ERA) principles. Within the frame of development programmes such as eTampere and Bionext, many 5^th and 6^th Framework Programme projects have materialised with new European partners. The Tampere Central Region EU Office has been active in Brussels since 1999, helping universities and research centres to locate new partners and to assist in project proposal processes.

With slightly over 200.000 inhabitants, Tampere is a small city in global terms. Nevertheless, it has been able to develop significant knowledge and market-leading industry which has led to a sustainable growth. Several actions to further enhance our knowledge base are currently ongoing, an important area being to increase the extent of cooperation based on complementary knowledge with other leading European cities. Tampere, along with its neighbours and partners, seeks to play an active role in implementation of the Lisbon Strategy.