In the beginning of December 2014 the Italian city of Padua hosted the second international symposium ‘Why the world needs anthropologists’, which was attended by more than 200 visitors from Europe and beyond. At the event, annually organised by the Applied Anthropology Network of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) in collaboration with various institutions, the speakers and the audience tried to find out how to establish cooperation between academic and applied anthropology.