Universitatea „lumii reale”: epicentru de inovație în societate și de formare a competențelor profesionale.

Universities used to serve primarily as fountains of academic knowledge, which they provided to students as an end in itself. However, now they are undergoing a transformation from the traditional model focused solely on propagating knowledge with intrinsic value to providing knowledge as a tool for developing skills for the job market and for societal progress in general. Universities in the United States adopted this new model as early as the previous century when they doubled their primary role of knowledge transfer to students with knowledge transfer into industry and innovation ecosystems. The European Strategy for Universities reflects this transformation, which reacts to the perceived gap between the skills acquired at university and those needed to achieve professional success, amid persistent changes in the labor market. For this reason, both the specialized literature and the collective consciousness have begun to contrast the university, perceived as an institution where knowledge is decoupled from current professional trends and where students experience a too structured and predictable learning environment, with the ‘real world’ outside academia, which is the labor market, affected by fluid and complex challenges. Therefore, new didactic methods, such as living labs, have emerged in order to support this growing need. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]