Multidisciplinary Institute of Digitalisation and Energy (MIDE), a research program on digitalisation and energy technology at the Aalto University, carries out important long-term projects aimed at creating high-level expertise, strengthening teaching and increasing the competitiveness of Finnish business and industry. MIDE is building cooperative groups where the expertise areas of research groups are combined in a broadly-based fashion. The objective is to achieve significant synergies in planning of projects, carrying them through and exploiting their results.

The aim of the research program is to strengthen the competitiveness of Finnish industry, research and training on the global market as well as education which overlaps the projects’ research areas in that field. As part of the Aalto University and national centres of expertise, the School of Science and Technology (formerly TKK) is advancing in areas of global interest and, from the Finnish standpoint, in areas of importance and of engineering skills that produce innovations.

Funding for the research program was collected with the help of the ”Technology for life” campaign, the goal of which was to obtain a funding amounting to at least € 20 million from companies and communities to realize the research program. The campaign was organized in 2008 to honor TKK’s 100-year history. The intention was to use research freedom to attract gifted individuals from Finland and abroad to work at Otaniemi on issues that are of fundamental importance to science.

Digitalisation and energy questions as basic research issues

Altogether, the MIDE research program includes 11 projects, the research areas of which range from nanobuds and the benefits of LED lights to the use of virtual worlds as cooperative tools.

The purpose of MIDE’s digitalisation research is to bring together the expertise of various fields of engineering to resolve shared research and application issues and promote the exploitation of the potential that ICT offers in generating new thinking in all fields of technology.

The purpose of MIDE’s energy research, on the other hand, is to engage in basic research to produce Finnish and internationally competitive energy technology applications which can be productised so that the benefits derived from these applications outweigh their investment cost many times over. Energy research is expected to respond to demands for efficiency in energy production, storage, transmission, distribution, usage and environmental aspects in emerging and industrialised economies.