Professor Juha Näsi In Memoriam

Juha Näsi, Professor of Corporate Management died on 7 September in Pirkanmaan Hoitokoti (Hospice) in Tampere gallantly struggling against a disease which ultimately sapped his strength. Born on 22 February in Tampere, he was 59 years old.

Juha Näsi's life's work was meritorious and widely acknowledged in the fields of corporate strategy, business expertise and management studies, having served as a professor at the University of Jyväskylä, at Tampere University of Technology and at the University of Tampere, most recently as the director of the School of Business Administration. He was also Adjunct Professor (Dosentti) in strategic thinking and strategic management at the National Defence College.

Professor Näsi's contribution in raising the standard of Finnish business economics and in its internationalisation was highly significant. Purposefully and energetically he created around himself a network of top-level international researchers and was generous with the fruits of it to his own scientific community, to Finnish economic life and to an exceptionally large number of postgraduate students. Professor Näsi himself was a visiting professor in the United States and in Canada for more than three years, 1987-1988 at the Mississippi State University, 1990-1991 at McGill University and 1995-1996 at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

Over and above his intensive research and educational activities, Professor Näsi was a keen networker and organizer. He was a member of numerous domestic and foreign learned societies and associations and was awarded scientific prizes and distinctions in recognition of his actions. He was also an exceptionally energetic organizer of international conferences. In spite of his illness he spared himself no effort, participating in the internationalization of economic sciences and as a supervisor of dissertations to increase postgraduate degrees in the field.

Although he was an exceptionally active and meritorious researcher, he was never confined to academia. He designed and largely implemented numerous programmes in strategic management intended for corporate management and also served as an inspiring and popular director of the joint MBA programme of the University of Tampere and Tampere University of Technology. He was superbly adept at presenting the listener with reasoned and competent material in an interesting and frequently entertaining manner. His mode of presentation was original and sparkled with humour, and enriched by excellent tales of his fishing expeditions in Lapland, his coast-to-coast exploration of America complete with a family of five. His social adroitness made him an eagerly awaited and well received speaker on both practical matters and in scientific forums. It also helped him to attract top names to our remote corner of the world. Juha Näsi was moreover an utterly humane person, an unfailingly conscientious, precise scientist in pursuit of competent results.

Petri Vehmanen
Proud to have been Juha Näsi's
long-term colleague and family friend

Translation by Virginia Mattila