Vesa Tuomela, Lecturer in Business Administration

Vesa Tuomela teaches business administration not only to students of this degree programme, but also to students of other fields at HAMK.

He has also been involved in developing the concept of the Entrepreneurial University of Applied Sciences, which experiments with different forms of business learning. Among the best known are business idea development courses Amazing Business Train (happens in a train) or Startup Business School. The latest experiment was a workshop for Hämeenlinna high school students at the HAMK premises, where 400 high school students got a glimpse into the world of higher education over three days.

Vesa quickly grasps what it means to be a bettermaker in the business context.

“So-called better business economics starts from the premise that people and business can always improve in relation to themselves. We don’t have to compare ourselves to anyone else, and that’s a great idea.”

In his own work, he feels that he is a bettermaker when trying to make sure that each learning experience is always better in some way than the previous.

“At the core of my work is the promotion of learning and the creation of knowledge. In this area, each time you can do something even better than before by changing a practice, for example by introducing a new tool, a new method, a partner, a learning task, a theory, a new concept…”

An example of the latest new tools used by Vesa are different collaborative and digital platforms such as Miro, Whiteboard or Google’s Jamboard. Vesa has found that students are realised and encouraged to do things they might not do in a normal environment.

“These are platforms that I think are quite nice for learning nowadays: taking a single idea forward, experimenting. That’s how I try to do my work myself and sometimes I feel that the enthusiasm is then transferred to others.”

One of the most recent motivating experiences was the above mentioned gathering of high school students at HAMK.

“We got some great assignments from companies, the students came up with great solutions using AI and we had some nice encounters with students and colleagues. I felt that it was worth a try.”