The Intentional University for an Innovative Future: Building Bridges Within and Beyond

​The scope of the current paper is to problematize the responsibility of higher education institutions in creating innovative avenues for unleashing their students’ agency for the global good. The paper will first make the case for such responsibility (the “why”) by building upon a case study that focused on youth attending higher education institutions in the Kyrgyz Republic, Central Asia. The research examined the knowledge and perspectives of university attending youth on issues of poverty and social inequality in the country – considered to be among the most fundamental threats to sustainable development in any society. With this empirical backdrop, the paper will then build an analytical argument for structuring technology enhanced models of global learning and global problem solving (the “how”) that could bridge the great divides of inequality and social inclusion (the “what”) in an increasingly connected yet polarized world.