People need different answers to different problems. In a complex time of crisis, the Intelligent University must be a platform of change, where knowledge and creativity create new solutions of value to a more demanding market. The Intelligent University promotes a permanent competiuve approach to innovation and at the same time develops new social ideas that promote a different integration of people in different global contexts. The Intelligent University is by no doubt one of the keys for a new agenda we want for our society.  

The Intelligent University  allows people to know who they are and have a strong commitment with the values of freedom, social justice and development. This is the reason to believe that a new standard of Democracy, more than a possibility, is an individual and collective necessity for all of us, effective global citizens. Habermas is more than ever present – the difference of this new world will be in the exercise of the capacity of the individual participation as the central contribution to the reinvention of the collective society.  

The Intelligent University in an Open Space where collaboration and participation are the drivers of a new way of communication. In this way it´s essential to learn the lessons that more than ever emerge from a world that is trying to rebuild its competitive advantage  and to reinvent its effective place in a complex and global network of relations. In the New Global Economy and Innovation Society, people and companies have a central role to play towards a new attitude connected with the creation of value and focus on creativity.     

The Intelligent University is a permanent commitment between the local and the global.  The Intelligent University must confirm itself as an “enabler actor” in a very demanding world, introducing in the society and in the economy a capital of trust and innovation that is essential to ensure a central leadership in the future relations betwen the different social and economic players. These new actors  should be more and more global, capable of driving to the  social matrix a unique dynamic of knowledge building and selling it as a mobile asset on the global market. 

The Intelligent University is also an effective actor of permanent social integration. The Intelligent University must know how to integrate in a positive way most of the citizens that want to develop new ideas. Social cohesion is done with the constructive participation of the citizens and it is more and more necessary an effective attitude of mobilization for this effort. A positive integrative policy is a signal that the different actors have a common road to follow in the future.

This is the time of the Intelligent University.  The Intelligent University is effectively constructed by all the actors in a free and collaborative strategic interaction. The Intelligent University is the answer of its teachers and students. An active commitment, in which the focus in the participation and development of new competences, on a collaborative basis, must be the key of the difference. This is purpose of the Intelligent University.

Francisco Jaime Quesado is the General Manager of the Innovation and Knowledge Society in Portugal, a public agency with the mission of coordinating the policies for Information Society and mobilizing it through dissemination, qualification and research activities. It operates within the Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education