Digital Creativity for developing Digital Maturity future skills (DC4DM - Grant Agreement n° 079913), is a three-year research project, funded by the European Commission under the Erasmus + Programme, whose main objective is to implement, apply and disseminate within a European network of universities, SMEs, startups and business incubators, the DC4DM educational model to train the digital talents of the future in guiding companies in the paths of transformation and achievement of digital maturity.

The DC4DM model aims to enhance those digital creativity skills that companies need to adapt to an ever-changing digital landscape:

• skills and mindset to understand the potential of digital technologies and apply them to the design of digital solutions with a human-centered approach;
• individual skills for creativity and digital culture, as well as the ability to communicate and share knowledge with other people in a cross-functional team;
• skills and mindset of future and anticipatory thinking, to generate long-term strategic visions, imagining future scenarios.

During the project, the model will be developed by gathering cross-functional methods, tools and skills from across the consortium, fostering cross-cultural knowledge sharing from academia to industry and vice versa.

The concrete outputs of the project will be the educational tools to be adopted for training the skills included in the model, in particular:

• Digital Maturity Vocabulary to build shared knowledge for working with emerging digital technologies.
  
• Digital Maturity Pills that tell good practices to be shared with Universities, SMEs and startups in Europe.
• Learning Lab format, a project-based educational workshop for students to support the development of creative skills, to manage challenges through the DC4DM model and to learn in interdisciplinary environments.
  
• Digital Maturity Toolkit consisting of innovative tools and methods to nurture and connect design education with technology-driven digital activities.
• DC4DM Edu BOXes and MOOCs to provide experiences, tools, guidelines and pathways for working with other universities, SMEs and startups, and CE strategies and programs.
• DC4DM Open books and scholarly articles as tools to promote the goals and results of the project within academia, the design community, companies and research centers.

The DC4DM project also includes: 2 short-term training events for design educators (co-design workshops and Bootcamp); 6 events (Digital Maturity Day) open to the public, start-ups and SMEs to spread the knowledge of the strategic potential of creativity and design to drive technology application; 3 intensive study programs (Learning Lab) with students of design, engineering management and computer science.

The consortium, coordinated by Prof. Marita Canina Associate Professor of the Department of Design and scientific head of the IDEActivity Research Laboratory, includes 4 universities - Politecnico di Milano (IT), Universitè Jean Monnet Saint-Etienne (FR), Institut Mines-Telecom (FR), Universidade de Madeira (PT) - and a business incubator - Startup Madeira (PT) - located in 3 European countries.

The project