In this #PROFILE series, we touch base with the recipients of DESIGNSCAPES’ 3rd and final Open Call for design-enabled Innovation Scalability Proofs.

In early February we touched base with Giulia Sala and Hanna Rasper from the project Ticket Tour, powered by PUSH and Ticket for Change France. They told us about their experience as PUSH Studio started transferring the originally French initiative, working around COVID-19 restrictions, and building new connections and networks in their area.

Ticket Tour in short

The project aims to develop a tour for youngsters that would put them in contact with local entrepreneurs and “mentors”, with the goal of discovering opportunities and uncovering talents that could help them kickstart their careers. Ticket for Change France, an established organization and project in France already for a few years, is now being replicated by PUSH Studio in Sicily, Italy. 

What is Ticket Tour currently busy with?

At Ticket Tour, they’re focused on setting up the bases for their project’s sustainability in the long term. “We’re expanding our team and it’s starting to go into a more sustainable direction,” Hanna told us. “We are now forming an advisory board for our activities” she continued, “(and) next week we’re having news from the transferring organization, so Ticket for change France, who will decide on the licensing”, “we can then finish our press releases or social media campaign, which is like all on hold at the moment”. 

“We’re expanding our team and it’s starting to go into a more sustainable direction.”

 

They are also about to run a co-creation workshop involving different stakeholders in the project, “we have the ‘talents’, the participants that will go on the tour, we have some potential coaches and potential ‘role models’, the entrepreneurs from Sicily” she explained, adding that “we will co-create together our first tour prototype and that’s gonna be very exciting!”

Working around the obstacles brought by the COVID-19 crisis

The team was aware from the very beginning how the pandemic could affect their original plans, postponing the entrepreneurial tour. The team focused then on setting up the stage for it: “The most important thing was starting the real structure foundation of the project with Ticket for change France and really understand from their mistakes, from their journey … take the best of it and bring into Sicily”, Giulia said. 

Even beyond the tour itself, the team is trying to build a larger community around the project. “The idea is also to create some digital content and we were thinking about video pills, in which we are presenting all the people that are participating to the tour, the mentors, the role models”, Giulia explained, “in order to start tickling the mind of potential future users of the tour in understanding what is going on, what we are doing, what is the network that is involved in this initiative.”

The partners behind this replication

“(With Ticket for Change France) we met each other on the same point in our plans,” Hanna explained, “we were looking for someone from whom we could learn and transfer here, and they were actually looking to internationalize their program”.

The two parties in the project have complementary but different backgrounds: “Josephine (from Ticket for Change France) has more of a background in economics”, Giulia explained, and her organization has by now “deep knowledge about what it means to become an entrepreneur and then teach others how to do that”. “Within PUSH, we are mainly architects, engineers, designers, programmers…”, she continued, “we are sort of a research lab, so we are incubating small projects for a period of time […] then spin-off them.” In the project, they put their “ability to see how different projects can work and connect within them.” 

 

The complementarity among the two teams already showed to be a resource, “having someone that is much more focused on their financial and economical stream is really, really important” Giulia told us, “the market research that they did, the evaluation of social impact is something that we also look forward to implementing ourselves by also increasing our team and seeing how we can work together”.

Regarding what has helped transferring the project in a new context

An implicit strategy of Ticket Tour for scaling is creating and activating a large network of stakeholders, with whom to build strong long-lasting relationships. They work “with different partners according to different occasions”, Giulia explained, “it’s really a network that is more extended, and that can grow in value, while working together.” And for networks to collaborate, relationships are really important to nourish. “Something that we see as very valuable is not only the inspirational part, seeing someone that succeeded,” Giulia told us, “but also the in-between part in which by mentoring, by checking with the other parties, you will actually build a relationship with them that can bring to different moments of check-ins and sharing of tips on how certain things are working, so this idea of scaling”

In order to expand their networks for this project, the team works with selected stakeholders from different cities. From Palermo we’re not able to understand exactly what is happening in Catania or in Enna, but then you go there and, through them, you open up.” Giulia explained, “So our idea is also to use these ‘role models’ in each city to be the first point for opening up a smaller network of people and discover who is a bit out of the grid, right now.” 

About the main lessons learned so far

One of the biggest realizations for the team was on the benefits of taking a co-creative approach, also involving different local stakeholders, to develop the service in Sicily. “We don’t have to have all the answers”, Giulia said, “we just need to ask the right question to the people that we are involving in the process, because the answer can come from them”. This opened up their perspective towards different opportunities offered by the local context.

“Let’s open up the concept.”

 

If the initial idea was “grab all the knowledge from the French context and apply it to the Sicilian one”, Giulia told us, now she is thinking more in line of: “Okay, let’s actually open up the concept even before, when we are still deciding what the tour is going to look like and who can put the research on, and from there on continue together, because that is a great asset”. 

What would Ticket Tour like to achieve in the coming months?

“Seeing that maybe after three years that the talent themselves can actually be part of their own social, environmental, enterprise that would be actually the main goal,” Giulia said. Learning from their experiences the team understood “how important it is to create also a network that doesn’t stop at the end of the tour’”, as Giulia added, “there is a need for establishing an infrastructure that gives the support and the right mentoring process to the (young) ‘talents’ that started something, otherwise you always have the risk that you start and then everything drops, and what it stays in just a nice adventure.”  

“The aftermath […] to help them choose their own path, where to go, is super important.” Hanna added, “And we cannot choose for them, but we can lay out the infrastructure so, for example, we can connect them to incubators, to coaching programs, with like different ‘anchors’ for each participant.” 

The team looks already beyond the tour in July, eager to find ways for young talents as well as stakeholders “to be part of this growing network and to continue with this ‘positive vibes’ for youth, and work, and entrepreneurship”, in Hanna’s words.

All photos: Ticket Tour