Third Mission and Digital Transformation: An Opportunity to Take Advantage

Digital technologies transformed people’s life, business and society. Higher education systems are particularly affected by digital transformation, which can enable new learning and teaching processes, innovative organisational dimensions, and services, providing new opportunities for the development of the Third Mission. Digital technologies at the service of HEIs can permit them to reinforce their role of drivers of growth and development for their own ecosystems; represent an opportunity to foster education participation; to develop lifelong and lifewide learning initiatives; to share new cooperation paths with different stakeholders; to promote digital culture as a means for innovation and entrepreneurship; to help actors in their ecosystems adopt and use digital technologies to become more innovative. This paper introduces concepts and definitions on how the digital transformation is affecting HEIs, with reference to the Third Mission and presents the main results of a field research conducted in an international research project.