University: from the Third Mission to a cognitive mission
As knowledge becomes distributed across networks, businesses, territories and intelligent systems, the university can reclaim a central role as a place where different forms of knowledge meet and are transformed.
The university no longer holds a monopoly on knowledge. Advanced research also takes place within businesses, private laboratories and international networks; digital platforms make knowledge accessible everywhere, while skills and professional roles rapidly become obsolete. The crisis facing academia therefore concerns its role within a system in which knowledge is created and circulated in new ways.
In the article published in Agenda Digitale, Paolo Zanenga identifies the Third Mission as a space for regeneration. Alongside teaching and research, engagement with society allows the university to act as a node connecting academic knowledge, businesses, institutions, cities and communities, while engaging with the problems and experiences rooted in different places.
This vision is embodied in the C-School, a School of Connection in which disciplines, languages and communities generate new questions, and in the Transition Institute, which brings the same approach to relationships between universities, cities and businesses, combining research, learning and action.
The Third Mission thus takes on the characteristics of a cognitive mission: its effectiveness also lies in the capacity to interpret complex systems, bring tacit knowledge to the surface, connect different worlds and forge alliances. The university-based Transition Nodes envisaged as part of the collaboration between CRUI and Diotima Society turn this opportunity into place-based laboratories, where experiences and projects feed research and collective learning.
Artificial intelligence can support this process by formulating questions and connecting explicit knowledge with forms of knowledge that have yet to be articulated. In this way, the university reclaims one of its original functions: creating the conditions to understand and address what remains unknown.
Read the full article on Agenda Digitale: “Universities in crisis? How the C-School and Transition Institute are rewriting the Third Mission”
Nadia Simionato - Diotima Society