Winning projects of the Call&Ideas of the students of the Specializing Master in Strategic Design

Mind Of Your Own proposes directions in the fields of lifestyle, events and community activities that can elevate the quality of life for residents and first degree connections within MIND.

The licensing strategy developed by the team is upheld by three important values: Belonging, Regeneration and Progress. As a burgeoning innovation district, MIND needs to keep its people at the core of all new initiatives. Thus, people-centricity, understanding needs and building a community is the highest priority. So, encouraging a sense of belonging is key.

Mind Of Your Own proposes three directions that encourage these values in varying degrees:

– MindSpace is a physical entity and a social space where people can engage with friends, food and books throughout the day.

– MasterMind is an events-property created for all online and offline meet-ups, seminars, conferences and hackathons with themes of education, research and innovation.

– Mind@Ease is a community-driven experience property focussed on hobby classes and fun workshops to facilitate collaboration and up-skilling through doing.

Starting from the brief they were given, which aimed to create a licensing strategy for Mind, with the intention of supporting the consolidation of its Ecosystem, promoting the values and themes of the innovation district, the team developed the project starting with an exploratory phase, followed by a phase dedicated to the collection of all the necessary information. During this phase, the students defined the key points on which to base their strategy and their main layer of action onto which they grounded the short, mid and long-term strategy: to create a sustainable future for next generations by leveraging on education and digitalization.

As a starting point of thier planned licensing journey, they selected three main companies to potentially partner with: Minecraft (short-term), Treedom (mid-term), and Impactscool (long-term). Moreover, they foresaw multiple future scenarios and opportunities that easily show the big potential that Mind, as this complex set of active players, can achieve.

For sure to get there, they planned to use a strong communication strategy to spread the word and to create a Mind’s badge to award partners and stakeholders that are willing to drive the change hand by hand with Mind brand.

Connecting, empowering, living is the motto and leitmotif of the strategy, which includes MIND’s core values of technology, innovation, and collaboration. In support of our thesis, market analysis of existing innovation districts and case studies in partnerships and collaborations was crucial. To achieve a solid licensing strategy in the long term, MIND should first establish itself as an innovative and cutting-edge brand, gaining visibility and increasing its brand awareness. The strategy is developed in the immediate, near and distant future, through three directions that go hand in hand, co-branding, collaboration, and archive:

• With the co-branding strategy we aim to work with Italian start-ups in the field of sustainable fashion that share MIND’s ideals, to develop and launch a MIND line with the aim of capitalising on Milan’s long history and heritage as the design and fashion capital of the world
• Strategic partnerships make MIND the perfect venue for major design and innovation events. With the partnership strategy MIND can leverage its growing brand awareness to collaborate with TEDx to organise events to promote the MIND project, with the idea giving the opportunity to purchase a MIND Licensing Package, which would guarantee the use of the brand and venue to host an event with the addition of merchandising and media coverage
• Events and content will be documented and with the archive strategy MIND will become a real archive through podcasts and documentaries, with the idea of licensing content in the future as case studies for universities, research for academia, content for documentaries and docu-series.

With the implementation of these three directions, MIND will become an ecosystem of shared partners, channels, products, and services for both the public and private sectors, leveraging the assets of its territory to achieve a strong brand positioning. Once the three strategies have reached maturity, MIND will develop the personality of a cutting-edge innovation district and become a hub for knowledge, creativity, and exploration, to drive the future with MIND Runway, MIND Events and MIND Documentary.