Shoe Manufacturing in Europe faces an intense and growing competitive pressure brought forth by low-wage countries.To maintain competitiveness DOROTHY promotes a response based on the transformation of shoe industry and related business model meant to strengthen Europe’s ability to compete in terms of high added value for the customer (as cost-based competition is not compatible with the goal of maintaining the Community’s social and sustainability standards). This transformation relies, on one hand, on the development of tools for the design of customer driven adding value shoes and, on the other hand, on the realization of tools for the design, configuration and reconfiguration of flexible multi-site multi-nation production plants, meant to manufacture those customer driven shoes. DOROTHY mission is to “design customer driven shoes everywhere, manufacture them intelligently anywhere” as a crucial challenge for shoe industry to gain competitiveness in the global markets, also through better cooperation (and not only to compete) with low-wage countries. In order to address this challenge and to support the proposed new paradigm, DOROTHY fosters three main scientific and technological objectives and their corresponding research clusters: 1- Design tools for the intelligent customer driven and customer fit shoe, as added-value product/service; 2- Tools for advanced industrial engineering design of multi-site and multi-nation production systems and factories, based on the customer driven shoe; 3- New business models associated with the above mentioned paradigm, meant to support it; Given the global challenge addresses, the proposal is coupled with an IMS initiative