Telephone
+267 395 9730
Mobile
+267 7233 2995
Fax
+267 393 3119
Mr Ari Kalmari has over 14 years of experience building regional innovation systems in the academic and technology centre sector in close cooperation with local businesses and industries. 2004 he was invited to Lahti Science and Business Park Ltd, a leading environmental technology centre in Finland but also responsible for innovation- and hi-tech-oriented growth programmes and related services for all the industrial clusters in the Lahti region. Mr Kalmari has been in charge of the development activities of the most significant cluster, mechatronics/ICT, and he is also a cluster board member. Currently, he is responsible for innovation and development activities for the wellbeing cluster as a director of the national Regional Centre Programme in the Lahti Region. Lahti is one of the leading Finnish regions in developing the public-private partnership and private well-being business. Mr Kalmari also is an official representative of the Finnish State Technical Research Center VTT in Lahti.
During his academic career (1993 - 2004), Mr Kalmari was responsible for building and starting the ICT engineering line at Lahti University of Applied Sciences. He was also managing the educational and administrative functions of the line, which finally formed half of the volume of the faculty of technology. Mr Kalmari himself specialized in telecommunication, data network technologies and electronics. In 2001 he founded and managed a new R&D unit, Lahti IT Centre, together with the Helsinki University of Technology, Lahti University of Applied Sciences, the city of Lahti and local companies. IT Centre's mission was to boost R&D work in the companies and develop their competitiveness, especially by promoting the utilization of ICT. IT Centre activities were moved to Lahti Science and Business Park at the beginning of 2004.
During 1985 - 1993 Mr Kalmari worked for Lahti Precision, an international provider of machine controls. He was in charge of programming and automation and was responsible for several plant start-ups in Russia, Estonia, the Nordic countries, an the UK. He also was responsible for one significant business development project, which consisted of designing the first after-sales products and starting the after-sales business which he also managed.
