Developing new models and educational approaches supporting digital entrepreneurship within cultural and creative industries (CCI)

The paper introduces DigiMooD, an on-going research program run at European level by six partners to develop and test new pedagogical approaches. The project aims at developing and testing the offer of a set of innovative and interdisciplinary educational modules in “Digital Entrepreneurship for the Creative Industries (CCI)”, with a specific application to the Fashion Industry, its companies’ branding and narrative strategies and the digital service models. This represents an emblematic sector for Europe where the digital transformation is impacting cultural, social, and productive matters thus looking for further experimentation and learning: fashion is a mature sector that is being consistently disrupted by the new generation of key enabling technologies such as digital fabrication, advanced manufacturing, wearables, sensors and embedded systems; this is renewing fashion business models, service systems and consumption habits meaningfully intersecting creativity, technology, and entrepreneurial skills. In particular, it addresses the following programme objectives: • Equipping students in arts in creativity, business and technology with the knowledge and core transferable competences they need to think and work across cultural and creative sectors and disciplines. • Improving the quality and relevance of teaching and learning in arts and culture disciplines by linking creativity, business and technology. • Developing an entrepreneurial culture among the students and the teaching staff. • Stimulating innovative learning environments within and across disciplines through the integration of creative, digital and entrepreneurial education. More in details, the hybrid delivery methodology proposed includes the combination of MOOCs and Field Projects and internships. The paper will introduce the Quantitative and Qualitative research which supported the development of a new learning process and dedicated toolkit to design and implement MOOCs to fill the specific skills gaps detected in CCI. In fact, to have a deeper understanding of how companies in the fashion industry are facing the digital skills gap, DigiMooD consortium developed a survey submitted to a sample of 50 companies operating in the fashion sector, collecting their feedbacks and insights. Moreover, to frame the most required competences by companies, which are taking advantage of the digital transformation, DigiMooD consortium selected 12 innovative players for a semi-structured interview, from both Italy and France landscapes, two leading contexts for fashion CCI. Furthermore, both these two types of research were supported by desk research, which led the consortium to build a framework of digital competences. The framework highlights the three areas for the definition of the learning objectives: technical skills, business acumen and creative attitude. As a result, the paper will introduce two main deliverables of the research process: 1 the emerging schemes of skills’ gaps occurred in CCI through digital transformation, 2 the tool-kit designed to develop MOOCs dedicated to this specific sector.