Strategic design for University-industries cooperation for a collaborative network developed through work-based learning and knowledge sharing

This contribution reflects upon the complex relationship between University and Enterprise, understood as the world of Research and Industry. It seeks to understand the real base to organise this interaction so that it can create a dynamic and continuous transfer responding not only to the needs of all users involved but also to current and future challenges. In this way, research leads us to understand the importance of this territorial network, capable of fostering processes of innovation and highly qualified work, between the academic, training and business worlds. Furthermore, we also dwell on which approaches and methods, typical of the discipline of Design, can contribute to cooperation between the different nodes and users, from students to entrepreneurs. Specifically, the discipline of Design - given its nature and capacity for mediation - could play the role of providing the appropriate tools, such as to guarantee concrete continuity in this interchange and positive territorial spin-offs, thus also triggering social changes. In order to show the concrete effects of these reflections and the methodologies used to make them concrete, this contribution mainly analyses two case studies: the first is a strategic hub project NOTLab - Network of Living Laboratories for materials (University of Florence, Department of Architecture); the second is SMOX® - a smart container for the transport of biosynthetic matrices in the health sector.