UK Road Trip
Last week I was over in the UK, where I took in meetings at the Design Council in London, Design Wales in Cardiff, and the Centre for Research on Innovation and Competition (CRIC) at the University of Manchester. First to folks over at the offices of the Design Council in Bow Street London, where we talked in depth about various research findings with respect to recent business surveys conducted by both the Centre for Design Innovation and the Design Council. We also had a nice discussion on research strategy and future projects. The Design Council have just completed a survey of a sample of 500 businesses that were questioned with respect to quantifying how they add value to their core offer, and the link between how they do this, design and business performance. They are some really interesting findings here that the Design Council will be publishing shortly, and which I look forward to reading in full.
Next up to the University of Cardiff where I was kindly granted a tour of the Product Development Research (PDR) Centre before meeting some of the folks across the corridors at Design Wales. The Rapid Prototyping and Injection Moulding services that PDR provide to surrounding SMEs are really impressive and I think that a facility such as PDR would serve local industry around the North West of Ireland extremely well. I also got to see the Rapid Prototype model they developed for Ross Lovegrove’s (renowned industrial designer) award winning water bottle design. Very cool! Across then to the offices of Design Wales, where I came away very impressed by both their design promotion and support operations. Design Wales are also leading a very interesting European Interreg funded project entitled SEEdesign. This project provides a network for the dissemination of good practice relating to design support for small companies (SMEs). It is made up of seven European partners who are cooperating in order to capture and build upon the knowledge accumulated within the various design support programmes that aims to improve the effectiveness of the support provided for local SMEs relating to design issues in Europe.
Avoiding the blizzards in Cardiff, I headed on up to UMIST where I called in to see Professor Bruce Tether at Centre for Research on Innovation and Competition (CRIC). Bruce is well respected in the area of Innovation Management and Strategy where he has extensively published around the areas of systems innovation and measurement of innovation activities. His research interests also extend to the relationship between design and innovation, which occupied a large space of conversation. Bruce kindly gave me a copy of his recently published book ‘Design Inspired Innovation’ which I highly recommend.
After whistle-stop tour of London, Cardiff, Manchester, it was time to catch my flight back to Knock. I was fortunate that I was able to avoid the heavy snowstorms in the UK, and I was looking forward to getting home. After nodding off on my flight over the Irish sea, I awoke upon hitting the runway, only to discover that it wasn’t the runway in Knock we had landed on, but that of Shannon over a hundred miles away!! Apparently Knock airport was closed with heavy a snowfall. I guessed I wasn’t going to be home any time soon, and I was right, I wasn’t!!
