This paper aims at showing how design can become a strategic lever to help a productive context grow (SMEs, practitioners, corporate policy, and research system). In particular, it focuses on the ability of design to enable social and economic connections among the actors involved in a project, to find new ways for developing innovation within SMEs, and to make young designers face the entrepreneurial reality.The projects developed at the INDACO department of Politecnico di Milano show how creativity can add value to the professional relationship between young designers and micro, small and medium companies. These projects use action-research as methodology and aim at promoting design culture in the Italian local productive realities. Specifically, the case studies presented in this paper use mechanisms of design knowledge and technology transfer [19], that is the physical transfer of innovation agents (newly graduate designers) into companies. With the researchers' support, these mechanisms have led to develop product, service and communication projects in collaboration with SMEs. The approach followed is based on the concept of "human capital growth" [16] that adds expertise to the company aiming at action-taking.Moreover the pilot-cases were developed through a practical process of learning by doing and learning by interacting, with a double benefit for participants: companies previously unfamiliar with design had the chance to experience the potentials of design, and young designers experienced real working situations, applying their technical knowledge on product development and production processes [4].The paper focuses mainly on the latest of these pilot cases, that is the project DEA -Design E Artigianato per il Trentino, looking at the collaborative experiences developed with small manufacturing companies in the province of Trento. It also tries to sum up ten years of research and experimentation on the topic. The aim of the paper is to try and consolidate a model of knowledge exchange [15] for developing innovative projects with the aid of design, supported by both University and Entrepreneurial Associations as trust generators [10,13].

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More and more often we assist to a shift from a knowledge-exchange model, from teacher to students, to a more peer educational model, where a real specific problem is set as a goal of the learning process. The use of virtual environments allows all the actors, either students or teachers or partners to be involved in the generation of common knowledge in a collaborative arena where new skills and new methodologies arise for the use of all peers in order to increase awareness and defining solutions that really matter for the problem. From open resources to entirely open learning models, e.g. MOOC and open universities, today are becoming paradigms to create social and environmental innovation.Peer and Open Education is spreading as effective way for students to overcome not only problems with obtaining accurate information, at the same time developing skills on discerning how to judge the accuracy of the information they receive in the Internet era, but also to make the educational, and consequently the learning, process become self-motivated from the fact of being a chance to impact on real complex problems of life. This paper describes the specific case of the "Co.Meta" Lab, a didactical model born from the collaboration between the Design School of the Politecnico di Milano and a Charity Foundation -Fondazione Trentina per l'Autismo.A complex socially relevant problem-goal, improving the quality of life for people with Autism, was introduced as the core of the learning process. The initiative was called Co.Meta -by merging the concepts of "Cooperation" and "meta-design" and was the opportunity to experiment a design teaching approach that brought self-motivation from students in learning tools and methodologies. Design operated widely into daily issues for autistic people bridging the gap between the consciousness about design responsibility and new perspectives for the future young design professionals.Since 2012 the course focusses on the generation of product-system projects. Students have designed several concepts for brand new products from games to therapy supplies to disability devices. The recipients are patients, relatives and care givers, all gravitating around Autism, an unsolved and little-studied pathology implying huge complexity and a deep social impact.The designing process is supported by an online blog, that serves as instrument for knowledge management and as communication and networking tool. Autism is a multi-faceted and complex issue that requires access to wide and specific information, a kind of research that normally would not be possible time-wise. From networking the research we allowed the coopetition among teams happen and this led to the creation of shared knowledge among students and with the Foundation, in a fully open source perspective. Psychologists, therapists and educational trainers were also involved to give their support, either in the classroom or online, allowing students to better address the field of interest and giving proof of the multidisciplinary perspect...

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