Higher education establishments today accommodate an ever increasing number of innovative workspaces, which demonstrate their ability to adapt to new needs, their willingness to open to their environment and their aptitude for transforming their real estate portfolio.
New uses are being established at the heart of higher education facilities, offering an optimal framework for innovative teaching, the decompartmentalisation of subjects, horizontal cooperation and openness to the non-academic world. Their emergence has been made possible thanks to a number of factors coming together: a strong desire to renew teaching methods through innovation and to develop entrepreneurship, strategic thinking about changes made to the real-estate heritage of these establishments, a desire to establish a more open connexion with urban space and exterior players (the economic and associative worlds, self employed entrepreneurs, the unemployed, residents,…).
23 examples, resulting from interviews conducted within higher education establishments enabled us to better understand the challenges and advantages linked to these spaces. They highlight the extent to which these initiatives call for investment and creativity on the part of those who carry them out, they demonstrate their success through the numerous new projects generated by them but also show the difficulties faced when it come to sustaining funding for these tools.
