Florence Project - Bezalel Design and Innovation Lab at Soroka Hospital is a unique innovative approach to teaching in the 21st century. The Lab is focused on strengthening the connection between academic learning and the changing demands of the modern labor market. Higher education institutions around the world are struggling to deal with dramatic changes in the way academic institutions function and prepare future graduates for their next stage in life. A variety of voices is heard in the academic world, calling for a change in studying methods and even for a revolution in the way higher education is treated and built. One of the most complex challenges facing academia today is to understand what added value it must provide to its students in a changing world and an ever-evolving labor market.

The concept of the Florence project, a living lab amidst a hospital, was presented for the first time by Michal Eitan, the initiator, and manager of the project, to the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design management in 2020 and since then, the program had 4 semesters and the 5th is about to begin this October.

The unique project brings together design and architecture students from a variety of departments at Bezalel, to experience a reality that cannot be artificially produced within the walls of the academy. The innovative teaching and learning model in the project includes, among other things: a physical move of the students in Be'er Sheva (in a Student Exchange fashion), work in hospital wards - a living, breathing, and intensive system, with actual hospital staff and patients, and exposure to the constraints of the system daily. The students use the methodology of design thinking to face the real and complex challenges of the hospital and are guided by an interdisciplinary team of lecturers from Bezalel and hospital staff. They dedicate the whole semester to one project that allows them to experience the complete work process almost from end to end – practically from ideation to prototype.

This unique framework is a kind of incubator where the students face the reality of life in the real work world in a less controlled and mediated way than within the academic world. The process they go through allows them to develop essential basic skills for the current and future labor market, as claimed by recent studies, such as creating added value, the ability to operate in a changing environment, the ability to learn and adapt to new ways of working and the ability to deal with conditions of uncertainty.

There are multiple challenges the program faces. First and foremost – the need for the academy to accept a unique program that takes students off-campus and away from the regular curriculum.
Secondly, in the program itself, there are the actual challenges presented by hospital management. During the semester the students have to address these challenges and come up with solutions. Hospital management recently defined some of these design solutions as "dramatic".
Thirdly, each semester program staff have to balance between pure academic teaching and the need to allow a practical experience (action learning) and real-life experience.

Keywords: Living-lab, design thinking, academy-industry cooperation.