Can we reinvent education in one day? This is the main task the organization has set itself. How? Confronting the entrepreneurial and the academic mindset, figuring out on the one hand what entrepreneurs can teach education, and how the industrial university can inform today’s knowledge economy on the other. Analyzing emergent alternative educational models worldwide. Learning about authentic, emergent, and culturally embedded learning processes. Gaining insight into the drivers and values that have shaped the western university system. Testing if they can be turned into centers of opportunities and risk. Understanding what makes innovation possible, but also why we are so fond of it. Coming up with sustainable ways to valorize knowledge for its own sake. Going wild.

As the 21st century digital revolution continues to disrupt the economy, and the traditional knowledge claim held by experts of the 20th century is making way for a global entrepreneurial mindset, (university) education finds itself on the verge of its most radical transformations since the industrial revolution. Whose Crazy Idea Is It Anyway is an academic endeavor that has the ambition to set the agenda in the educational landscape of the coming decade.

It will do so by formulating radical ideas on education, and applying them to enterprising pilots in the course of 2011-2012 in five Dutch Universities. The host city of Amsterdam forms an ideal setting for this quest: we will imagine it as the center of the new center less and mediated universe we all daily navigate; a city skilled in reinvention, which has always managed to imagine the future without entirely jettisoning the past.

The work conference takes a specific angle to tackle the education issue: the (presumed) tension between entrepreneurial and academic values. Where do these values overlap and when do they contradict each other? What kinds of learning environments can start to emerge when both these worlds join forces? And how can these new learning networks be equipped to address urgent societal issues?

One of the anchors of the event is the popular myth of “the wise merchant”, one of the founding myths of the University of Amsterdam (a university that, interestingly enough, was never really founded according to some). On January 9, 1632, renowned theology scholar Caspar Barlaeus delivered his inaugural address for The Athenaeum, a merchant school centered on knowledge and commerce. The idea of a “mercator sapiens”, a wise man of trade who honors and protects science and finds inspiration for his business in philosophy, is still intriguing today. Barlaeus attempted to establish a productive relationship between the city and the academy, the professional world and the sciences. Today, we have tools to imagine education as a testing and breeding ground for an informed and enterprising form of citizenship.

The day will bring together a thinking crowd that will be made up of stakeholders of the conference’s key issue: selected Honors Program students, educators, entrepreneurs, policy makers, as well as local and national media. The aim is to connect those experts who realize that the future of education is closely tied to the future of our society and who want to be part of the solution.