How time flies! Even as we savour the celebration of the 50th Anniversary, we are now celebrating the 52nd anniversary of the founding of INTEC. How great that we celebrate it by looking ahead to the next 50 years!, thinking that it was no longer a matter of flying high like a seagull to see further, but of rising now like an eagle to look even further into the future, as the founder Jose Joaquín Puello recommended to us in the midst of the commemoration of our first fiftieth anniversary.

Precisely, we had barely finished celebrating our fiftieth anniversary when we were already defining an Institutional Strategy 2023-2027 that guides us today on this path of our coming years.

With this strategy we continue our mission of pursuing academic excellence, a goal that seems to be on the horizon because every time we take a step towards it, the standards and aspirations for quality education move forward.

Responding to the first strategic purpose of becoming a leader in our training and scientific-technological activities with an updated and forward-thinking academic offering, we aim to ensure international academic accreditation.

We are completing the processes that will continue the international accreditation of our psychology and medicine courses. Our bachelor's degree in psychology had already received international accreditation from the National Council for Teaching and Research in Psychology (CNEIP), Based in Mexico, it is the first in the country to have this type of accreditation, and has recently received a follow-up visit from its evaluators, complying with the accreditation program. 

The same is happening with our medical school, the first in the country to receive, five years ago, international accreditation from the Caribbean Accreditation Authority for Education in Medicine and Other Health Professions (CAAM-HP), with the recognition of the World Federation for Medical Education (WFME)This year we already had the visit of the agency's evaluators for reaccreditation for a new period, and the result of this reaccreditation process is now pending for the beginning of next year.

In the case of our programs in the area of ​​economics and business, the Board of Commissioners of the International Accreditation Council for Business Education (IACBE, for its acronym in English) ratified the accreditation of our programs in the Area until the year 2030. The reaccredited programs are Business Administration, Marketing and Digital Business, Accounting and Financial Analytics, and Economics. Likewise, the master's degrees in Human Talent Management, and their concentrations in Corporate Finance, Financial Markets and Financial and Risk Engineering, Senior Management; Quality and Productivity and Finance, and their concentrations in Entrepreneurship, Service Management, and Health Services Management. Meanwhile, International Business and Commercial Engineering were accredited for the first time.

To crown these efforts, we are proud and satisfied that, after a sustained effort of almost 6 years, the careers of Electrical Engineering, Industrial Engineering and Mechatronics Engineering obtained the international accreditation of the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET), a world leader in quality assurance for engineering programs, the most demanding accreditation body to which we have submitted ourselves.

INTEC thus becomes the first university in the country with ABET-accredited programs and joins a select group of academies in the world whose quality standards also have the endorsement of the rigorous organization.

But we are going for more. The engineering department has already begun work to apply for ABET accreditation of other engineering programs.

We are also going further by proposing the certification of our quality assurance system by ACSUG, an accreditation agency registered in ENQA,  European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education throughout the European Higher Education Area and registered in EQUAL, the European Register of University Quality Agencies. In this way, a certification or accreditation by ACSUG extends its validity to the entire important multinational area of ​​higher education. But, in addition, once our quality assurance system is certified, the doors are opened for the accreditation of our academic programs with European standards.

Another important initiative that also reaffirms our strategic purpose of positioning ourselves as a preferred partner in national scientific-technological and productive development and the strategic directive of value-generating links is that of LearningFactory. Based on our relationship with Penn State University, with his experience of more than 30 years leading this program and the visits to its director in Pennsylvania and from him to our country, we can say that LearningFactory It is already a reality at INTEC and in the country.

Briefly, for those who don't know yet, LearningFactory It is a program in which students from different degrees, in interdisciplinary teams with the advice of a professor, work on a real problem presented by companies and with their support, for an innovative solution, evaluated by the company itself, following international design standards and procedures with which they test the skills and knowledge they have acquired in their studies.

En LearningFactory We have already carried out 20 projects with 12 companies (some repeating with new projects), among which are Grupo Ramos, Mercasid, Eaton, Accumed, Macrotech, Tonka, Jabil, Hanes, Remington Medical, Quala, Bionuclear and the Duarte Industrial Park.

78 final year students have participated in these projects, advised by 6 professors from 11 different courses. Learning Factory, thus, came to stay as a distinctive feature of INTEC and has already obtained the Recognition for Educational Innovation granted by the Center for Industrial Development and Competitiveness (Proindustria).

Something similar has happened with the Plastics Training and Research Center (CCIP), inaugurated in May 2022 as a joint initiative of the Ministry of Industry, Commerce and MSMEs (MICM), the Dominican Association of the Plastics Industry (ADIPLAST) and INTEC, which has already obtained the gold medal in the IV edition of Recognition of Best Practices in the Area of ​​the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) of the United Nations, recognition coordinated by the Ibero-American General Secretariat (SEGIB), evaluated by the Ibero-American Business Council (CEIB) and managed by the Ibero-American Foundation for Quality Management (FUNDIBEQ). With the support of its partners, INTEC has internationalized the Center in its relations with the Plastic and Rubber Training Institute (ICIP)), from Colombia and with AIMPLAS, the Valencia Institute of Plastics Technology, Spain, the first Spanish center offering tests accredited by the National Accreditation Entity (ENAC).

Together with the CCIP, INTEC has established the Bioplastics and Biomaterials Innovation Unit with the support of the German Agency for Development Cooperation (GIZ), the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and the European Union (EU). This unit is supported by a laboratory for the development of projects related to bioplastics and biomaterials, and the preparation of biodegradability studies, in order to determine the uses and applications of the bioplastics developed.

Additionally, INTEC, in alliance with the Colorado School of Mines and funded by the US National Science Foundation, has formed the first network of researchers in the Circular Economy of Plastics for the Caribbean, Latin America and the United States with the participation of dozens of representatives from universities, institutions and international organizations.

Following the strategic guideline of value-generating links, we developed together with the American biotechnology company TheGreenCell a plant tissue cell micropropagation project at laboratory scale, through which stem cells from various plant species will be reproduced and innovative technologies will be developed to scale up their production to a commercial level. Professors and students from the Biotechnology, Biochemistry, Mechatronic Engineering, Software Development, Systems and Project Management courses at INTEC have collaborated on this project.

As a very important note, we would like to highlight that this team of professors and students has developed bioreactors and other analytical equipment that enriches our laboratories, in support of applied or use-inspired research.

These and other developments in our laboratories allow INTEC to provide technological services to companies such as Origin by Ocean, which exports sargassum from our country to its bioprocessing plant in Finland, where it produces important pharmaceutical and cosmetic products from this macroalgae.

To conclude with these examples of value-generating alliances, I will refer to the macro project initiated together with the Ministry of Industry, Commerce and MSMEs and the Duarte Industrial Park to convert the latter into the first eco-industrial park in the country, registered in the circular economy, which makes it a model of energy efficiency, including renewable energies, use, treatment and reprocessing of water, reduction or mitigation of pollution and other environmentally friendly practices, to improve the environmental, economic and social performance of all the companies in the Park, following the methodology developed by the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO). This project, which will include our professors and students from all academic areas, will provide experiences that allow this model to be reproduced in many other industrial parks in the country.

I have limited myself to just a few key examples of our value-generating engagement initiatives and efforts.

I would like to briefly refer now to what we are doing to achieve the strategic objective of developing an online teaching model with international standards. With the COVID-19 pandemic, we were forced, but successfully, to launch what Josep Planell, then Rector of the Open University of Catalonia, called emergency remote teaching. We maintained operations and “saved” the academic periods during that difficult period, to then return to the face-to-face teaching that predominates and that has characterized us.

This does not mean that we have given up on exploring and taking advantage of online education. On the contrary, in our commitment to academic excellence, the Dean of Academic Development proposed in April 2021 a Didactic Model for Virtual Education and, encouraged by it, we adopted international standards for virtual education presented by Quality Matters, a non-profit organization based in the United States that works to support the quality assurance goals of online education.

We have taken the position that, in order to develop online classes, teachers must be certified, for which different international training courses are offered and culminate by putting together a course that meets the standards rubric of Quality MattersTo date, 157 teachers have been certified and the training and certification process continues with a new cohort of 26 teachers.

At the same time, we have entered into an alliance with Coursera, the online teaching platform with more than two thousand courses on different topics, taught in 29 countries and by 147 institutions, which has allowed us to offer a significant number of courses to our collaborators and teachers and, through the latter, to our students, enriching our own courses and offering those of Coursera as electives or regular courses with the guidance of our teachers.

With our certified teachers, we will enter into our own online course offering, meeting international quality standards in this educational modality and in a nearer rather than distant future we will go from being just consumers of online courses to Courserto be offerers of our courses through this and other international platforms.

We trust that this strategy will have an international impact on the projection of INTEC and its teaching staff, who we have no doubt will stand out in this new field of their activity. 

I cannot finish this sample recap without referring to the new ERP, the new financial, academic and human resources management platform that we are in the process of implementing. It is People Soft Campus Solution, Oracle CorporationWith this new ERP we are making a very important financial investment and efforts to achieve a significant improvement in our academic, financial, administrative and human resources management processes. The process is progressing at a promising pace because we had planned to have the financial module installed by the end of November and we have already had it in production since the beginning of October.

I have given just a few brushstrokes that illustrate how we are deploying our Institutional Strategy 2023-2027 and moving forward in our second 50 years, encouraged by the motto of our first fiftieth anniversary: ​​a legacy that inspires and moves us towards the future.

I would like to recall now the words of Victor Hugo, who proclaimed: “Change your mind, keep your principles; change your leaves, keep your roots intact.s ". 

We continue to build the university that our founders dreamed of and started. We are innovating and inventing in line with the times, remembering Eduardo Latorre, who wrote in 1977 that no one had a definitive answer as to how a university should be and how it should be organized in a country like ours, but that we had the obligation to make the effort to build and develop it, attentive to our specific historical circumstances, without reproducing obsolete models or those designed to serve societies with problems very different from ours.

What I had no doubt about, along with the other founders, as I wrote in 1978, was that the best asset of an institution is and always will be merit, the pursuit of excellence, and that every institutional development strategy has to be based on that idea and not lose sight of its fundamental objective: to contribute to the transformation of Dominican society.

A university measured by its impact on improving the quality of life of the inhabitants of our country, as a result of all its activities, not by its promotional nature or by its size in number of students, as Ramón Flores and Miguel Cocco wrote in 1975, who went on to say: an austere university, which managed to do a lot with little, and which did so, as an example to give to its students and to society, renouncing all ostentation, as a challenge and as an exercise in creative search for new solutions that would make impossible projects possible in our country.

A university that, if it were not attractive in economic terms, wrote Rafael Toribio in 1976, would offer citizenship to all its members, and in this way would give them participation in forming a community, in the sociological sense of the term, much more than a place of work or a source of primary or complementary income, and thus a space for personal fulfillment where one is willing to make a committed commitment to the mission, without limitations.

With these roots we are shedding leaves, but faithful to our roots, with the motto of the present Institutional Strategy: Forging the future today!