April 2017
Further the completion of all conference related activities, among them the publication of photo gallery on the Project website, the Project Team continued to arrange the 2017 Summer School. Organisational and promotional activities were carried out.
Registrations to the 2017 edition were opened starting from 1 April until 31 May.
Prof Baruffi and Caterina took care of the finalisation of the programme, considering the suggestions and the proposals submitted by the attendees of the 2016 Summer School, as well as the positive feedback received with regard to the speakers at the Conference of 10 March 2017. The final version of the programme maintained the 42 teaching hours envisaged in the project’s application, with some adjustments as described below.
On the one hand, building up on the feedback received from the attendees of the previous edition of the course, the modules on IP and contracts law have been improved with new lectures given by Mr Giovanni Casucci (Lawyer at Dentons) and Ms Margherita Cera (University of Padua). Moreover, Prof Roberto Flor (Assistant Professor of Criminal Law at the University of Verona) was asked to join the Teaching Staff delivering a lecture on the criminal aspects of counterfeiting and Ms Sara Massalongo (Trainee lawyer at Dentons) has been added as co-teacher of the lecture on IP case law.
On the other hand, to ensure continuity with the topics dealt with during the 2017 Conference, specific lectures on the role of social media, the digital transformation of fashion companies, and marketing strategies in the fashion industry, have been included in the course programme. They were to be delivered, respectively, by Mr Andrea Albanese (Social Media Marketing and Digital Communication Advisor), Mr Gianluigi Marino (Lawyer at DLA Piper), and Prof Claudio Baccarani (Full Professor of Economics and Business Management at the University of Verona). In order to provide a more practical perspective into his lecture, Prof Baccarani called his colleague Prof Marta Ugolini (Full Professor of Management at the University of Verona) as co-teacher, while Ms Daniela Cavallo (Architect) and Mr Gianluca Tacchella (Chief Executive Officer at Carrera S.p.A) were invited as guest speakers.
Regarding the workshops (additional to the 42 teaching hours), the Project Team deemed advisable to schedule fewer activities, following the suggestions of last year’s participants. Therefore, the finalised version of the programme envisaged two workshops that were already scheduled in the 2016 edition of the course – to be held, respectively, by Ms Anna Caprara (Consorzio della Moda) and Mr Samuel Marinelli (Associate Partner, KPMG Tax & Legal) – and added a new one-hour workshop on restructuring transactions of fashion companies, to be delivered by Mr Luca Magrini (Lawyer at DLA Piper).
Isolde arranged the practical aspects of the organisation. In particular, she reserved the room in the Law Department, contacted the lecturers providing administrative information and, jointly with IT Offices, created guest accounts (made up of username and password) that would be provided to the Summer School attendees at the beginning of the course. Thanks to those accounts, they would be able to connect to the University Wi-Fi network.
Diletta requested the accreditation of the course to the Bar Association of Verona and to the Director of the PhD School of Law and Economics of the University of Verona. Both institutions positively evaluated the request and the course was thus part of their respective accredited training programmes (more specifically, the Bar Association assigned 15 credits for the participation in at least 80{a14a5fb528fe56ca25149d65a85f27027fc08aee43dd8ba19daa5f9e2276d995} of the scheduled activities, while the PhD School assigned one credit every 8 hours of attendance).
Cinzia was involved in promotional activities. She drafted promo posters, with essential information on the course’s contents and its agenda, as well as the accreditation and the deadline for registrations, and uploaded them on the project website.
Other activities were carried out by Marta jointly with the stagiaire, Maddalena, who updated the bibliography on fashion law issues available in a specific section of the project website and drafted the Newsletter n. 2/2017. Marta revised it and then uploaded it on the project website. The Newsletter was also sent to a wider audience thanks to the already reviewed mailing lists (academics, practitioners’ associations, general public), as well as the project social accounts (Twitter and Facebook). The issue contains some highlights of the Conference and its results and reports useful information about the upcoming edition of the Summer School.
May 2017
The dissemination activities continued to be performed throughout the month in order to promote the upcoming Summer School.
The programme and the relevant information about the course were published on the website of the Department of Law (https://www.dsg.univr.it/?ent=iniziativa&id=7081&lang=it) and of the PhD in European and International Legal Studies of the University of Verona (https://eils.univr.it/dettaglio-eventi/-/wcm_display/Summer{a14a5fb528fe56ca25149d65a85f27027fc08aee43dd8ba19daa5f9e2276d995}20School{a14a5fb528fe56ca25149d65a85f27027fc08aee43dd8ba19daa5f9e2276d995}20-{a14a5fb528fe56ca25149d65a85f27027fc08aee43dd8ba19daa5f9e2276d995}20Univr{a14a5fb528fe56ca25149d65a85f27027fc08aee43dd8ba19daa5f9e2276d995}20Fashon{a14a5fb528fe56ca25149d65a85f27027fc08aee43dd8ba19daa5f9e2276d995}20Week).
Diletta and Maddalena posted promotional posters at relevant locations in order to attract potential attendees (such as Departments and Libraries of the University of Verona, practitioners’ associations offices, the Court of Verona).
Diletta and Cinzia introduced and illustrated the Summer School to young practitioners attending the Legal School of the Bar Association of Verona and the Specialised School of Legal Professions, who represent one of the main targets of the course.
Information on the Summer School were sent via e-mail to the Bar Associations of Vicenza, Padova, Trento e Brescia and also published on the website of the Italian Society of International Law (SIDI – ISIL), https://www.sidi-isil.org/?page_id=7862.
Diletta collected and listed the applications with the assistance of Maddalena, who checked the documents that have been sent to the project e-mail address and answered to the e-mails.
Cinzia registered a Google e-mail account in order to create a cloud on Google Drive, as an easy-to-use tool where relevant materials for the lectures would be uploaded.
Marta and Maddalena drafted the evaluation survey that would be distributed at the end of the Summer School. It contained questions on various aspects of the course (contents, Teaching Staff, organisation and delivery, overall satisfaction), as well as free questions in order to get suggestions and advice for the last edition of the course. Moreover, Marta drafted specific evaluation surveys concerning each member of the Teaching Staff, whose outcomes will be evaluated by the Project Team with the aim of gathering specific feedback on the lecturers for the 2018 edition of the course.
Diletta prepared a course’s guide for the participants. The guide included the overall presentation of the project and the description of the Teaching Staff, as well as the programme of the Summer School, the link to the Google Drive cloud and the username and the password needed to connect to the University Wi-Fi network.
Prof Baruffi and Isolde contacted interested law firms that were available to open internship positions to be offered to the Summer School attendees. Among them, KPMG Tax & Legal and Mr Giovanni Casucci, who took part in the Conference of 10 March 2017 as speaker and is a new member of the Teaching Staff, were confirmed as internship providers. Prof Baruffi and Isolde agreed to provide them with a list of applicants who are willing to take up this opportunity. The aim is to allow the internship providers to get directly in touch with the applicants in order to finalise the internship programme and offer an experience that suits both the interns and the law firms. This particular activity envisaged in the project’s application shows the importance of the mutual interaction between academia, entrepreneurs and legal practitioners, in order to foster employability and the creation of opportunities of cooperation.
June 2017 (before the Summer School)
The activities focused on the finalisation of the organizational aspects of the Summer School.
The Project Team checked all the applications collected. Their number showed a successful reception of the contents and objectives of the course that exceeded the expectations of the Project Team, and the applicants’ backgrounds proved to be generally impressive. Therefore, despite the threshold envisaged in the project’s application being lower, the Project Team decided to accept a higher number of participants that was the result of the effective promotional activity and the positive feedback obtained by the last edition of the Summer School. 50 applicants have thus been admitted, and this number was indeed considered manageable. The admitted applicants were then requested to confirm their participation by replying to the admission letters sent by Diletta and Maddalena.
Diletta uploaded the course’s guide on the Google Drive cloud and prepared six more folders, one for each day of the week, where the teaching materials that the Teaching Staff is going to provide at the end of each lecture will be uploaded.
Cinzia and Marta updated the project website with new contents: the final version of the Summer School programme, the section regarding the accreditation and the description of the Teaching Staff. Cinzia updated the social media accounts of the project, posting relevant information about the course.
Maddalena drafted the report on the conference of 10 March 2017 with a summary of the main topics addressed by the speakers. Marta revised it before the online publication that is scheduled within the first days of July.
19-24 June 2017: Summer School
The course has been successful as to the number of attendees and the overall positive feedback it received (for a detailed review, see the analysis of the evaluation surveys in Annex 1).
The participants who have reached the minimum of attendance required for the award of the certificate were 53.
The course was conducted with minor adjustments compared to the finalised version of the programme, due to an unforeseen commitment of Ms Anna Caprara (Consorzio della Moda). Therefore, Mr Giovanni Casucci has kindly agreed to further develop the topics of his Wednesday’s lecture on contracts law, with great satisfaction of the attendees. In any case, this unforeseeable adjustment did not affect the total number of teaching hours, given that Ms Caprara was meant to hold one of the additional one-hour workshops.
From Monday to Friday, light lunches were organised for all participants and Teaching Staff members, providing a useful networking opportunity between the Staff and the participants in order to build useful contacts even beyond the course.
During each lesson/workshop the registers of attendance were distributed and duly signed by the participants in order to check their attendance required for the award of the final certificate. To this end, Diletta and Maddalena collected the registers after each lesson/workshop.
On Saturday, the evaluation surveys were distributed among the participants with the aim of receiving their feedback on various aspects of the course. Then, after the concluding speech of Prof Baruffi jointly with the Project Team who deeply thanked all the participants and the lecturers, the certificates of attendance were awarded to those participants who had met the required minimum of attendance (80{a14a5fb528fe56ca25149d65a85f27027fc08aee43dd8ba19daa5f9e2276d995} of the total hours). However, upon request by those participants who were not able to attend the last day of the course, the certificates were given to them on Friday afternoon.
June 2017 (after the Summer School)
After the Summer School, a Project Team briefing took place on 26 June. The Team gathered to discuss the results of the course right after its conclusion and to plan the upcoming project activities according to the timeline.
In particular, further steps were planned as follows.
Prof Baruffi e-mailed the Teaching Staff members to thank them for their contribution in the successful delivery of the Summer School. Many of them expressed their satisfaction with the participants and the course, wishing for a similar success for its following editions.
Prof Baruffi also e-mailed the Summer School attendees to thank them for their participation to the course. Many of them replied thanking the Project Team and the Staff for the organisation of the course; their interest in its topics was so high that some of them also wished for an additional advanced course open to those who had already attended the Summer School.
Isolde reminded the participants interested in taking up an internship to send their applications. Two deadlines (26 June and 30 June) were set up in order to meet Mr Casucci’s request to admit interns within the first week of July. Isolde and Diletta collected the applications and contacted the internship providers, so that they could evaluate them and carry out the recruiting procedures according to their professional needs and availability.
Diletta started collecting the teaching materials of those Teaching Staff members who agreed to upload them as open access resources on the project website. Their upload is scheduled within the end of July.
Marta carried out the analysis of the evaluation surveys and discussed them with the whole Team before drafting the report on the collected data (see Annex 1). Similarly, she drafted the report on the outcomes of the evaluation surveys regarding each member of the Teaching Staff and submitted it to the Project Team.
In addition, Maddalena terminated the stage at the European Documentation Centre and submitted a final report with all the performed activities that will be reviewed and then published in the next Report.
Verona, June 2017
* * *
Annex 1
Report on the 2017 Summer School evaluation surveys
The surveys disseminated at the end of the course were aimed at evaluating the general organisation of the Summer School, the contents of the lectures, the Teaching Staff and the methodology, as well as collecting suggestions and proposals on various aspects that might be useful for the third edition of the course.
The survey was filled out by 49 attendees of the Summer School. Amongst them:
- 44 were females and 5 males;
- 35 were under 30 years old, 10 between 30 and 39 years old and 4 over 40 years old;
- 9 were lawyers, 17 trainee lawyers, 12 law students, 4 foreign languages students and 7 of other professional categories.
Overall, the results of the evaluation surveys showed a high level of satisfaction with the Summer School, its organisation and contents.
The specific outcomes of the surveys are as follows.
Knowledge of the course
26 attendees were informed about the organisation of the Summer School by an exchange of information with other colleagues and 12 participants became aware of the course because of the news posted on the official website www.univr.it/fashionweek. Furthermore, 2 attendees decided to join the course after having participated to the 2016 edition. Other means of knowledge were the promotional communication sent by the Project Team through mailing lists (which include academics, students and other practitioners) and the presentations of the Summer School held during a class of the Legal School of the Bar Association. Respectively, 4 and 2 attendees knew about the Summer School thanks to those initiatives.
Objectives and contents
As to the objectives and contents, 14.29{a14a5fb528fe56ca25149d65a85f27027fc08aee43dd8ba19daa5f9e2276d995} of the attendees declared that before attending the course they had a poor knowledge about the provided topics, 53.06{a14a5fb528fe56ca25149d65a85f27027fc08aee43dd8ba19daa5f9e2276d995} was fairly aware of them and 32.65{a14a5fb528fe56ca25149d65a85f27027fc08aee43dd8ba19daa5f9e2276d995} had a good familiarity. As a result of the course, 8.16{a14a5fb528fe56ca25149d65a85f27027fc08aee43dd8ba19daa5f9e2276d995} reached a fair level of knowledge, 79.59{a14a5fb528fe56ca25149d65a85f27027fc08aee43dd8ba19daa5f9e2276d995} felt that their level was good and 12.24{a14a5fb528fe56ca25149d65a85f27027fc08aee43dd8ba19daa5f9e2276d995} very good, and none of the participants rated it low. 1 participant rated as fair the relevance of the Summer School programme and its topics, while 34.69{a14a5fb528fe56ca25149d65a85f27027fc08aee43dd8ba19daa5f9e2276d995} believed that it was good and 63.27{a14a5fb528fe56ca25149d65a85f27027fc08aee43dd8ba19daa5f9e2276d995} very good. None of them believed it was poor.
With regard to the topics on the fashion industry in the European Union, 13 attendees suggested that lectures on contracts law should be repeated in the next editions, while respectively 12 and 9 of them considered that intellectual property rights issues and marketing and communications should be maintained as part of the teaching lectures. Moreover, 2 participants proposed supply chain management and counterfeiting for the next edition and 3 of them deemed important the scheduling of lectures respectively on M&A, transfer pricing and innovation issues.
On the contrary, some of the attendees would not recommend repeating certain topics. In particular, 2 of them did not find very useful lectures on crowdfunding and on the role of social media in the fashion industry. Lastly, some doubts were expressed on patent box, international labour law, tax issues, digital transformation, antitrust and innovation of fashion industries.
Furthermore, participants submitted some topics that might be dealt with in the last edition of the Summer School. 9 of them asked for a more practical approach from a general point of view, while 4 of them made the same request but specifically related to young entrepreneurs’ experience (1), to practices of local SMEs (1) and to patent registration procedures (2). 7 attendees suggested to include customs matters, while further development of the role of e-commerce for fashion companies should be covered as suggested by 2 attendees. Lastly, other suggested arguments were human resources, logistics needs for the fashion industry, sustainability, co-marketing and co-branding and history of fashion.
Teaching staff
Participants were requested to evaluate the Teaching Staff members’ competence and communication skills. 2.04{a14a5fb528fe56ca25149d65a85f27027fc08aee43dd8ba19daa5f9e2276d995} (1 participant) considered them fair, 28.57{a14a5fb528fe56ca25149d65a85f27027fc08aee43dd8ba19daa5f9e2276d995} good and 69.39{a14a5fb528fe56ca25149d65a85f27027fc08aee43dd8ba19daa5f9e2276d995} very good, while 0{a14a5fb528fe56ca25149d65a85f27027fc08aee43dd8ba19daa5f9e2276d995} rated it poor. As to the quality and effectiveness of the didactic materials, 8.16{a14a5fb528fe56ca25149d65a85f27027fc08aee43dd8ba19daa5f9e2276d995} expressed that the uploaded and distributed resources were fair, 51.06{a14a5fb528fe56ca25149d65a85f27027fc08aee43dd8ba19daa5f9e2276d995} good and 40.82{a14a5fb528fe56ca25149d65a85f27027fc08aee43dd8ba19daa5f9e2276d995} very good, while 0{a14a5fb528fe56ca25149d65a85f27027fc08aee43dd8ba19daa5f9e2276d995} rated it poor.
Organisation and delivery
Further questions concerned the organisation of the Summer School and the Project Team’s activities. With regard to the Staff, which includes the Project Team, Academic Coordinator, Module Leader, Tutor and Secretarial service, 6.12{a14a5fb528fe56ca25149d65a85f27027fc08aee43dd8ba19daa5f9e2276d995} of the attendees declared it was fair, 40.82{a14a5fb528fe56ca25149d65a85f27027fc08aee43dd8ba19daa5f9e2276d995} good and 53.06{a14a5fb528fe56ca25149d65a85f27027fc08aee43dd8ba19daa5f9e2276d995} very good. None of them rated it poor.
Participants were also required to submit proposals in respect of the organisation and delivery of the course. 6 of them suggested that the daily number of teaching hours should be reduced, 1 of them to organise the course only in the weekends, while 3 participants pointed out the need to extend the course over more than one week. More workshop activities should be envisaged as stated by 3 attendees and other 2 people suggested providing didactic materials before the beginning of each session, in order to facilitate the comprehension of the lectures.
Overall satisfaction
Some remarks were emphasised from a general point of view. Proposals covered the needs of a more practical approach of the lectures and the involvement of entrepreneurs. Moreover, some of them asked for printed teaching materials, a stricter selection of the targeted groups, the involvement of other professional categories, as well as the organisation of an advanced level of the Summer School.
The highest percentage of attendees (61.22{a14a5fb528fe56ca25149d65a85f27027fc08aee43dd8ba19daa5f9e2276d995}) declared that the level of their overall satisfaction with the course was very high, while 34.69{a14a5fb528fe56ca25149d65a85f27027fc08aee43dd8ba19daa5f9e2276d995} expressed it was high. 0{a14a5fb528fe56ca25149d65a85f27027fc08aee43dd8ba19daa5f9e2276d995} rated it low or fair. 2 participants did not answer. With regard to their expectations, none of the participants declared they were met to a low extent, 8.16{a14a5fb528fe56ca25149d65a85f27027fc08aee43dd8ba19daa5f9e2276d995} was fairly pleased, 40.82{a14a5fb528fe56ca25149d65a85f27027fc08aee43dd8ba19daa5f9e2276d995} well satisfied and 48.98{a14a5fb528fe56ca25149d65a85f27027fc08aee43dd8ba19daa5f9e2276d995} very well satisfied. Indeed, 69.39{a14a5fb528fe56ca25149d65a85f27027fc08aee43dd8ba19daa5f9e2276d995} of the participants considered the course useful and 26.53{a14a5fb528fe56ca25149d65a85f27027fc08aee43dd8ba19daa5f9e2276d995} moderately useful. To these questions, respectively 1 and 2 participants did not answer.
Lastly, none of the attendees declared that they would not advise the course to other people, while 1 participant declared that he/she does not know if he/she would suggest the attendance of the course. 12.24{a14a5fb528fe56ca25149d65a85f27027fc08aee43dd8ba19daa5f9e2276d995} stated that if their suggestions were accepted they would do it and 85.71{a14a5fb528fe56ca25149d65a85f27027fc08aee43dd8ba19daa5f9e2276d995} confirmed that they would recommend the course.
Conclusions
Overall, the 2017 edition of the Summer School Univr Fashion Week proved to be successful as to its programme, topics and lecturers, with particular regard to the new ones, and as to organizational aspects, among them the constant presence of the Tutor and the availability of the Project Team.