MADE IN ITALY. AN INTEGRATED E-COMMERCE AND E-LEARNING INNOVATIVE PLATFORM TO PROMOTE EDUCATION FOR ITALIAN DESIGN SYSTEM (PRODUCT & PROCESS)

DesignBest concept is born as response to the necessity to create a virtual community (a square) about italian design matters. The extraordinary achievement of communities demonstrated the enormous potentials of technologies in supporting communication and self-production of contents to create strong communities. The program proposes to apply technologies to support a marketplace and to build a community around the education of Italian design. Leveraging the development of ITC technologies, the program integrates innovative web technologies 2.0, in order to: 1) Create, applying the most advanced web technologies 2.0, an environment where all active users (designers, design students, etc..), vendors or buyers, can develop ideas, concepts, events, opinions, about Made in Italy Design, joining potentials of vendors, designers, students, amateurs and curious; 2) Explain Culture of Project, display products’ characteristics, allowing the user/buyer to interact to capture the extra value of the product; 3) Use buyer's auto profiling and geo localization data to increase the offer and create feed-back flows which could be translated into networking; 4) Create data exchange with the logistic platform to assure the quality of logistic performance expected from the market; 5) Enable the sale of Design objects between the Italian SMEs (small, medium enterprises) and the potential buyers around the world (the business will focus mainly on the following markets: Brazil, Russia, India, China, Canada, USA, Mexico, Japan, Arab Emirates) trying to support Design SMEs in: - Reach the “critical mass” needed to build a wide catalogue of “Made in Italy” Design learning corses - Have access to an alternative sales channel, since they cannot bear investments in IT by themselves - Take advantage of DesignBest international visibility to reach new markets - Have access to e-commerce in an easy way (without problems related information technology structure, order management, invoicing, payment and shipment, returns and complaints management) - Leverage some supporting services to international sales and marketing (information, advice, training, data bank, market analysis, etc) - Spread the Italian Design culture through a platform of e-learning addressed to foreign companies and universities. Critical success factors of the project are: - A wide adhesion of Italian design schools to the marketplace, where they can offer part of their own catalogue (also ad hoc courses) exploiting a new channel (e-commerce) and entering on new markets; - The ability to attract the Design community (lovers, designer, students)