Educating the Future Digital Maturity Enablers. Learning from the Experience of the DC4DM LLabs

The ever-changing digitally enabled world we live in requires preparing young creatives and entrepreneurs with more suitable abilities and set of skills to face the challenges of ongoing digital transformations. The Erasmus + funded project DC4DM aims to implement a human-centered educational model to train Digital Maturity Enablers. This new type of professionals would be able to drive small and medium organizations towards their digital maturity: owning specific creative digital skills, they would be able to extract value from what the technological landscape offers and respond to the human needs through the principles of ethics and sustainability. This paper aims to describe the DC4DM educational model and reflect on the experience of three testing sessions, called DM Learning Labs, 10-days design-led workshops involving a great diversity of university students, diverse for country of origin and study background, start-ups, and several local mentors and stakeholders to co-design compelling future tech-scenarios. The paper will present the results from a preliminary study which aims to understand how attending a DM Learning Lab has impacted on the participants. Particularly, to understand which Digital Creative Ability had developed thanks to the LLab experience and which learnings were consequently applied in new creative and co-design contexts. The paper tries to highlight how much the DC4DM methodology has the potential to change the way to educate future professionals through cross-disciplinary and collaborative learning opportunities.