The fast and fluid changing market place in a competitive globalized context (Bauman, 2002), the increasingly aggressive competition and the high variability in the usage and mixing of products and services impose to Italian companies, especially SMEs and Craftsman Firms, the development of new abilities, in order to generate visions and interprete the signs of these transformations. From this perspective, design is becoming essential as value of the product-system.
In its latest definition (even if not yet univocally established) design has definitely evolved from the status of "applied-art" or "artistic-creative" discipline, thanks to its multi-disciplinary core, as well at economic and managerial level, as possible or even unique way to innovate the system of Italian SMEs.
Facing the changes of the design discipline, also the University research has changed, without remaining a closed academic model, but a system that proactively aims to get universities and the SMEs world close to one another, suggesting ideas, projects, services.
Therefore, we present a specific tool (Design_HUB) that aims at creating a permanent meeting place to exchange knowledge and generate innovative projects, changing the relation between University, Industrial Associations, young designers and SMEs. A virtually shared arena, a place to generate collective intelligence (Lévy 1996), supported by both University and Entrepreneurial Associations as trust generators.
Design_HUB capitalises on the potentiality of Web 2.0, where users can be editors, consumers, distributors and generators of content, for creating an open source creative arena, low cost and low impact, to be used both from enterprises and young users, previsioning new scenarios for cooperation.
It represents the systematization and the rationalization of 2 years experiences and concrete experimentations within the project DAC Design for Arts & Craft, based upon the action-research framework and implementally developed by a group of researchers of the INDACO Department of Politecnico di Milano.
DAC exploited the mechanism of the design knowledge and technology transfer (Tasch A.F. 1995) through the physical transfer of innovation agents (newly graduate designers) into companies, developing product, service and communication projects together with the companies themselves.
The achieved successful results (38 projects with 34 companies) witness the value of this model, in spite of the irregularity of the event.
Therefore Design_HUB aims at structuring this kind of meeting, consolidating its results, starting and sharing new innovation processes through shared innovation pursued through online technological resources.
In conclusion, the challenge for the university is multi-layered:
1. experimenting a model for acting on the territory and supporting enterprises (action-research method);
2. promoting the diffusion of design innovation;
3. triggering knowledge-transfer processes through the introduction of young innovation agents (designers), able to bring in the company suggestions coming from the global contexts and facing the market's challenges by means of design culture and its systemic vision.
Design_HUB shows at last that University can shorten the gap between SMEs and Technology through Design itself: this means generating a collaborative self-fed circuit keeping University and SMEs closer and ready to face together any future challenge of the international context.