A two-way dialogue between universities and public and private organisations, in the context of stable relationships and collaboration, enhances their processes and orients research and education programs. Different mechanisms can be used to create and exchange knowledge but in practice some of them are not always feasible. For this reason, some specific approaches were implemented at the Politecnico di Torino. The paper presents the main practices of knowledge exchange and share between this university and the territory stakeholders that were involved in the education process in the past. Now the COVID-19 emergency forces all of us to re-think procedures and processes on the basis of a solid past experience, a networking approach to the problem and the aid of the digital transformation tools.