Stages of Collaboration

The cities of Flint, Michigan and Togliatti, Russia have a long and proud history of friendship. Flint and Togliatti established a sister city relationship in 1992, launching a broad and rich set of exchanges in a range of professional, civic, and artistic areas.

From the very beginning SOM and TAM envisioned PIME as a long-term partnership to bring the principles of market economy and democracy to a new generation of Russian leaders through collaborative education. The overarching goal of collaboration program is to transfer advanced management education competencies to TAM, to institutionalize those changes, and thereby strengthen business education and practice in the Samara region, and more broadly, in Russian society. These advances lay a foundation to establish TAM as an independent leading academic center for management education and development, and an important source of management talent for enterprises in the emerging Russian and NIS economies. In the process, UMF enriches its global curriculum, enhance the international competencies of its faculty and students, establish private sector support, and continue to develop and enhance its core competency to deliver high quality technology-mediated education.

PIME - I (1998 - 2000)

In 1998 SOM and TAM launched Partners in Management Education: The Flint-Togliatti Initiative (PIME), assisted by a two-year grant from the United States Information Agency.

PIME - II (2001 - 2002)

Success of Phase I and achieved results made it abundantly clear that technology-mediated learning must be a centerpiece of the next phase of collaboration. Consequently UMF and TAM mutually decided to run a pilot online program in fall 2001 and continuously in winter 2002, offering team-taught UMF courses for TAM students.

Summer Faculty Workshop 2002
In 2002 SOM and TAM have conducted the Flint-Togliatti Initiative 2002 Summer Faculty Workshop. This ten-day workshop was aimed at transferring the traditional classroom-based model of learning to a technology-mediated online format

PIME - III (2002 - 2005)

For the next stage of collaboration UMF and TAM has elaborated three-year multi-faceted
project (2002-2005). Complementing previous and concurrent collaboration, the project
extends, expands, and intensifies UMF/TAM partnership activities.