UNIVERSITY AND INDUSTRY: A WAY OF COLLABORATION BETWEEN LEARNING PATHS AND BUSINESS WORLD

The purpose of our text is to show a comparison between the demand of human capital from the business and the offer from universities. We have worked under the assumption that both the organization of universities and the general economical and productive dynamics are changing. The first implies the re-designing of the learning paths and the second has an influence on the background of professionals involved. In fact the modern economical environment has been characterized by complexity and dynamism in the recent past, as new careers emerge requiring new skills to adapt to organizational changes. As a consequence, the new role of the young graduate designer is going through a complex development, as the text will show. The academic world is prompted to deal more and more with the business world, creating synergies and new learning methods to establish a collaboration between two realities: knowledge and know-how.
The relationship between school and real working life has a great relevance in the environment of Milan, the centre of the culture for design, which represents a precious chance for a connecting bridge between university and companies. In Europe and internationally, the trend is to encourage this interaction and to make real the connection between university and productive world. The prospects of the continuous growth in Europe and the deriving new educational and professional needs encourage universities and companies to engage in a concrete dialogue.
As a result, young students will benefit from new learning paths embracing the two different ways of knowing: the theoretical knowledge, competence of the university system, and the know-how coming from the experience of the industrial and professional world. This is the only way to prepare students to work. This synergy can be very difficult, almost impossible, if it comes only from books or ex cathedra. For all these reasons, the Faculty of Design of the Politecnico in Milan, has established and regulated new learning tools in its educational courses. These tools aim exactly to the “professionalization” of the students’ careers: as an example, the design workshop and the apprenticeship before graduation. Both of them have the same requisites and goals which imply an active partnership with the industry. In this way, companies can find a new stimolous to improve their know-how, often influenced by their previous experiences, whilst acquiring new cultural viewpoints and sometimes new technologies too. This gives them the opportunity to break their usual schemes. Our text will analyze in depth one of these two tactic tools, the workshop, which offers companies a chair in the university, giving the same importance to both the practical and the theoretical way of learning.