What if the university of the future were more like a cocktail than a standardised product? This Future UniLab visionary report explores a creative approach to university integration, using the metaphor of a cocktail to illustrate how different ideas, cultures, experiences, and institutional traditions can be combined to create new forms of academic collaboration. Rather than proposing a fixed institutional model, the authors advocate universities that remain open to experimentation, diversity, and continuous transformation.

A central concept of the publication is „unfinishedness” — the idea that universities should intentionally preserve opportunities for change, participation, and co-creation. Academic institutions can no longer fully determine their role within society. Instead, they must engage students, researchers, staff, communities, and external organisations in shaping educational experiences and producing knowledge. This openness creates opportunities for unexpected discoveries, collaborative learning, and new relationships between universities and their environments.

The cocktail metaphor provides a framework for understanding both the processes and outcomes of university integration. The report identifies several essential ingredients of successful collaboration, including critical thinking, deliberation, expertise, co-creation, time, serendipity, feedback, and ethics. These principles encourage universities to value experimentation, acknowledge different perspectives, and recognise that failure can become a productive element of learning and innovation.

The authors also examine the characteristics of an integrated university from the perspective of its relationships with society. They highlight the importance of connecting international collaboration with local contexts, developing distinctive institutional identities, adapting to changing circumstances, reconsidering conventional rankings, and strengthening the university as a community for learning and exchanging ideas.

Ultimately, the report presents university integration as an ongoing process rather than a final institutional arrangement. The university of the future should combine academic expertise with openness, creativity, and social responsibility, providing a safe environment in which individuals and communities can experiment, learn from failure, and develop innovative responses to complex societal challenges.