Purpose The scientific-technological hub “Magna Grecia” rises up to establish intense synergies and interactions with the local, regional, national and international entrepreneurial systems promoting environmental technological innovation, with the objective of significantly growing the competitiveness of the productive system on site and in a territory, like the Ionian territory, of which they think results of economic politics and industrial bankruptcy. All of this in coherence with the European program “Europa 2020: a strategy for intelligent, sustainable and inclusive growth”. Design/methodology/approach The paradigm of the complexity is the characteristic paradigm of the historic period in which we live and from which we are launching our project. One systematic way (Bertalanffy, 1959) that was conceived and shaken to answer the challenge to which today we have been called to construct a sustainable community, in which different stakeholders can satisfy their needs without compromising the possibility that future generations can do the same. Educational systems elaborated in the scientific-technological hub “Magna Grecia” have been constructed to be able to encounter the needs of a society which is extremely variable and unpredictable; to shape to the complexity means, first of all, to change the way in which each of us knows and learns both in methods, and in content. The methodology is based on evidence based case study (Trinchero, 2004). Originality/value The possibility to work on a vision of a sustainable future depends on the capability of the citizens to open up to a new idea of citizenship. It is for this that to obtain a role of primary importance in the world of education, and that of the university, to be specific, called in order to accommodate and to make a new idea of development, founded on the systematic paradigm and capable of guaranteeing a holistic vision of the world: culture and the dynamics of education connected have great generative potential for the creation of economic value and consent the retrieval of the authentic sense of the territory, of its vocations, promoting educational routes accurate and capable of constructing a future of sustainable growth. This is how much we have and are looking to create. Practical implications To aim for and bet on, as we have done, the creation of a district highly qualified, capable to offer services of an elevated scientific-technological-environmental content means to consent the youth in the territory, who persist in this action to make business specializing in the environmental sector, a field that until a short time ago seemed impossible to develop in an Ionian city.