Higher Education and Science for Development: The Historical and Conceptual Foundations of Mode 3 Knowledge

The reflection is framed in the scenario identified in the essay “The new production of knowledge” (Gibbons et al., 1994) where the traditional way of knowledge construction, typical of the classical scientific research, is discussed (Mode1). In the same essay a new construction model, called “Mode2”, is proposed and it underlines the interactive and socially distributed aspect of the research proposing a transdisciplinary approach. The author’s reflection goes beyond this vision and proposes a further perspective called “Mode3”. The author offers the state of the art of this new perspective from a theoretical, methodological and practical point of view. The word “Mode3” is currently at the centre of an interdisciplinary research and it’s used for different objectives. The author in its international and interdisciplinary overview deepens, on one side, the “Mode3” perspective in the Philosophy of Knowledge and in higher education, and on the other side, he widens the “Mode3” dimension in the fi eld of management