EAAP on the role of the "Millennials" in today research activities

EAAP produces its Newsletter, free for the EAAP Individual Members, every month since 2004. It is a very appreciated and important tool for spreading information about Animal Science and actuality.

The editorial of the EAAP Newsletter 178, written by EAAP Secretary General, Andrea Rosati, focuses on the digital revolution and, consequently, on the importance of the role the millennials have on research activities. Here you can find the complete editorial:

“An important role for the ‘millennials’ in today research activities”

In the last editorial the importance of ‘big-data’ was described. Obviously, this will go together with the digital transformation of Industry 4.0, someway already projected towards a Social Revolution 5.0. This situation requires a rethinking of the skills and interventions necessary to face growing complexity and to remain competitive in a world of globalized research. To manage and implement a revolution, such as the one taking place in today’s research centers, we need actors equipped, above all, with the digital mindset; i.e. with an attitude now fundamental for operating in the digital landscape. For this we request the ‘millennials’, digital natives capable of overturning many of the paradigms which we were used to. Today the enablers of new organizational behaviors are not senior scientists but young people. Figures like these are necessary to ground the organizational maturity of scientific research both structurally and technologically smart.

Millennials can optimize processes and make certain organizational behaviors necessary in research and in its dissemination, since they can also activate those competent but still traditional senior scientists in new technologies. Today we are increasingly seeing a paradigm shift in the transmission of knowledge from the traditional leader-expert and follower-apprentice relationships between senior and junior scientists to the current situation where digital natives must be an integral part of the transverse transmission of technological skills. Millennials represent the frontier of techno-social supporters of these transverse skills in the digitalized research processes: they must be attracted, engaged and enhanced and, at the same time, ambassadors of now younger, sustainable digital-intelligent research.