Universities Web-Radio: A Web-Based Tool to Improve Industries, Institutions and Academic Interaction

Innovation and creative tools such as universities' web-radio can facilitate interaction between University- Government- Industry (Etzkowitz, 1983). We propose a new approach to dialogue and cooperation with these players. This means renewing university education at the same time, according to EU Parliament (2006). It is our certainty that encouraging entrepreneurial university creation passes through different initiatives to build the appropriate ecosystem: the right mindset with many tools and web-radio could be one of these. Web 2.0 is not only a set of new technologies and services; it is, most of all, a new way for people to interact. Internet, which began as an information tool, is now based on a variety of social networks and involved users that generate freeform contents, making the Internet a place of social relationships. Webradio is one of the web 2.0 tools. It is based on radio broadcast by Internet: it is very cheap, easy to realise and to manage. Thanks to these characteristics, it is able to provide highly specialised programs addressed to an extreme niche audience. As national data was lacking on web-radio offered at Italian universities, first of all we built a data set to identify and quantify how many of 96 Italian universities have got a web-radio and if it is used to dialogue with companies and public institutions, engaging students with focused broadcasts. Therefore, we listed all Italian universities, their geographical area, existence of a web-radio, the show schedule and their contents. Radio is music and an interview or program is only a short time in this music flow. Actually, it is a new attractive way to confront each other, to share ideas, eventually to start some kind of project or activity together. In this paper, we refer to a pilot project, called “WayOut", based on University Suor Orsola Benincasa of Naples' web-radio, realised from 2013 to 2015. It had a specific broadcast format: in one-hour time, on air, students, teachers and speakers met people from institutions, national or international brand managers, start-ups, journalists, government delegates, live or on hotline. The aim was to offer to participants and to the audience an opportunity to keep in touch with the professional world in a smart, immediate way, with a simple, informal language. The work of "weaving" relations with external parties, supported by the web-radio tool, is strongly evidenced by the comparison between the number of active agreements, signed by university with institutions and industries to realise internships: in March 2013, they were 950, and in January 2015, they increased to 1.350. From our research, it is very clear that web-radio is an undervalued tool and its potentiality is unexplored so far