Abstract
Nowadays, the role of universities is experiencing a conflict: institutions need certificated and specialized professionals, and students need real knowledge. One hardly could imagine the implementation of this combination in the higher education system, even at the beginning of the university career. Bachelor’s programs indeed tend to be overly specialized and dogmatic, careless of those creative processes underlying innovation. For these reasons, I suggest two innovations to rebalance the strife. The first consists of the possibility for each student to actively choose courses, thus creating personalized and heterogeneous study careers. The second innovation concerns the implementation of hackathon-based teaching to enrich learning through cooperation and competition to solve concrete problems. I suggest that these improvements would guarantee the formation of professionals and allow students to develop actively their system of knowledge, as well as they would break down the barriers to innovation in higher education.