The Scientific-Technological Hub ‘Magna Grecia’: A Strategic Role to Re-Launch and Reconfigure the Ionian Territory; Case Study

The context within which the university has been called upon today to serve has profoundly changed in respect of the past: the market and its needs, the autonomy given to each university, the process of globalization and the consequential need to internationalize, the necessity to constantly rethink oneself, also in light of the territory concerned and of the stakeholders who push to rethink and to make changes and profound, focused, and sustainable reforms. The university is therefore asked to reflect upon itself in a punctual manner, in an urgent process, constant cultural renewal and lifestyles, in the awareness one can start and can operate in a complex system even if it is in its own complex reality. Higher education can no longer meet the challenge of sustaining people in the process of integration in economic, social and cultural contexts which are always more varied and complex, supplying what is necessary to confront the challenges of the current realities and phenomena which originate from themselves. It should therefore concern itself with making sure that the educational courses are coherent and in line with more profound needs. Universities have, furthermore, the responsibility to set up green competencies and professions, to promote and carry out the betterment of productive and industrial models. It can’t ignore the need to construct solid and long-lasting alliances with the territory, in a way to plan and work together for the construction of smart cities and territories. On the basis of these premises the university as part of a territorial system needs to put effort into supplying instruments and to contribute to the transfer of the competencies to significantly influence the development of the territory in which it insists on activating its unexpressed powers. The scientific-technological hub ‘Magna Grecia’ rises up to establish intense synergies and interactions with the local, regional, national and international entrepreneurial systems promoting environmental technological innovation, with the objective of significantly growing the competitiveness of the productive system on site and in a territory, like the Ionian territory, of which they think results of economic politics and industrial bankruptcy. All of this in coherence with the European program ‘Europa 2020: a strategy for intelligent, sustainable and inclusive growth’. The paradigm of the complexity is the characteristic paradigm of the historic period in which we live and from which we are launching our project. One systematic way (Bertalanffy) that was conceived and shaken to answer the challenge to which today we have been called to construct a sustainable community, in which different stakeholders can satisfy their needs without compromising the possibility that future generations can do the same. Applying the theories of the complexity to an educational system like that of a university has great value, as it is always integrated in a complex reality and should always put the needs of that complexity in the forefront. Educational systems elaborated in the scientific-technological hub ‘Magna Grecia’ have been constructed to be able to encounter the needs of a society which is extremely variable and unpredictable; to shape to the complexity means, first of all, to change the way in which each of us knows and learns both in methods, and in content. The methodology is based on evidence based case study. The possibility to work on a vision of a sustainable future depends on the capability of the citizens to open up to a new idea of citizenship. It is for this that to obtain a role of primary importance in the world of education, and that of the university, to be specific, called in order to accommodate and to make a new idea of development, founded on the systematic paradigm and capable of guaranteeing a holistic vision of the world: culture and the dynamics of education connected have great generative potential for the creation of economic value and consent the retrieval of the authentic sense of the territory, of its vocations, promoting educational routes accurate and capable of constructing a future of sustainable growth. This is how much we have and are looking to create. To aim for and bet on, as we have done, the creation of a district (in collaboration with the Politecnico di Bari, the CNR, Arpa Puglia, the territorial corporations and the third sector) highly qualified, capable to offer services of an elevated scientific-technological-environmental content means to consent the youth in the territory, who persist in this action to make business specializing in the environmental sector, a field that until a short time ago seemed impossible to develop in an Ionian city. The employment and economic crisis, which has affected the Ionian territory, is, in fact, doubly bound to the environmental crisis therefore the proposals of resolution first need to be able to guarantee a development that will be sustainable and balanced. With the hub ‘Magna Grecia’ it is possible to give way to a virtuous association which will have positive consequences both on the environment as well as on the social fabric, motivating the creation of new, young enterprises created by highly qualified young people in the technological and environmental sector.