Project Profile

The project was conceived by nine young engineers from Taranto. It aims to create a web platform to incentivise the meeting between the demand and supply of labour, and promote the exchange and implementation of business ideas.

The project will materialise as a social network based on a computer platform, in which virtual pavilions will serve as a meeting point between people with similar job skills around specific areas of interest for entrepreneurial development. There will be two virtual pavilions created to test the project, referring to areas of interest for the economic politics of the area of Taranto, such as sustainable transport and cultural heritage and sustainable tourism. These pavilions will represent the virtual places where useful information will be collected to utilise the various skills of those involved, with the goal of encouraging and supporting a transition of the socio-economic core of Taranto towards new and more sustainable business opportunities.

Possible interested participants who will use the platform include working-age residents in the urban area of Taranto: current workers, the unemployed, women and students in their final years of high school.

The social impact of the project is immense and consists in the creation of new entrepreneurial initiatives sustaining the most vulnerable skilled social groups, whose interests and passions are not often easily recognisable.  

The project will therefore initially be tested in the city of Taranto, and then be scaled to the national level.

In March 2014, results of the project were as follows:

• Study of existing web platforms in related fields
• Case study of industrial restructuring
• Mapping and study of the population of Taranto in terms of skills, aspirations and needs
• Clustering of results gathered through mapping
• Interview of the actors of the territory of Taranto for the definition of the pavilions
• Creation of a constantly updated project website
• Articulation of data to be processed by the system of recommendation
• Creation of the platform's user registration form
• Creation of mock-up of the social network
• Definition of the business model of the platform
• Study and integration of markets of ideas within the site
• Creation of an announcement for the creation of the site logo.