The second policy booklet (PDF) from the SEE Project was recently published. There will be a total of four policy booklets over the course of the programme.

Design thinking can be a tool for realising social innovation and sustainable development by contributing to long-term behaviour change and integrating the user experience into significantly improved products, processes, services and systems. This Policy Booklet outlines the rationale behind policy intervention in this domain, explores how design can be employed to address social innovation and sustainable development, provides illustrative case studies and proposes policy recommendations. We have applied this framework under four headings: communities, industry, the public sector and policy-making.

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On the 9th November 2009, the SEE project launched its first Policy Booklet on Integrating Design into Regional Innovation Policy (PDF) at the SEE network summit in Copenhagen. SEE is a network of eleven European partners working to lobby our national and regional governments to assimilate design and creativity into public policy. The project is co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) through the INTERREG IVC programme.

The SEE Policy Booklet presents an overview of innovation policy priorities in the SEE partner regions. These priorities were identified from national and regional policy documents and contrasted with the strategic priorities for innovation identified by the European Commission. From this comparative analysis six key issues emerged as common across the policy agendas:

• Innovation in Services
• Public Procurement
• Collaborative Clusters & Networks
• Lead Markets & Eco-innovation
• Intellectual Property Rights
• Broadening the Scope of Innovation

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Countries that wish to increase their competitive advantage have turned to design as a mechanism to add value to the goods and services that their indigenous companies produce. Recognising that those companies that use design are more successful than those that do not, they invest significant time and effort in promoting and supporting companies to overcome the barriers to its effective use. Their goal is to increase the demand for design.

Increasing demand is only one side of the equation however; it is just as important that there should be a broad and deep supply of designers who can provide services to business to help them add value to their products and services. Without them, an economy can be starved of a key input that helps to differentiate the goods and services it produces.

A range of interrelated issues governs the supply of designers who provide services to business. The role of education is critical, as is the aspiration of the individual and ultimately the market for their services. But there are also a number of other more subtle influences such as the role of the industry support bodies, the nature of continuous professional development and the business empathy of designers themselves.

This report examines the strengths and weaknesses of the sector and makes recommendations about how to build on those strengths in order to stimulate one small but important part of the economy that can create added-value to the economy as a whole. Given the similar barriers faced by the sector in Northern Ireland and Ireland, it makes sense to adopt a cooperative approach to optimise the potential of the sector.

Aidan Gough
DIRECTOR, STRATEGY & POLICY
InterTradeIreland

Download study (PDF, 568k)

Perhaps the first question should be whether “standard” and “innovation” should even be in the same sentence. However, I feel very strongly that there are certain systematic approaches to managing innovation that might not guarantee you’ll end up with a string of guaranteed innovations, but you’ll stand a much better chance of success if you apply some best practice.

Every day we hear calls to innovate our way out of the current crisis, but there is little practical, step-by-step how-to for organisations to apply. It was with great enthusiasm that I participated within a group to help the NSAI draft a National Workshop Agreement on a Guide to Good Practice in Innovation and Product Development Processes. It’s not a perfect document. How could it be after two day-long meetings? It is a start and highlights the need for a practical approach and more practical tools.

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Th UK Design Council recently published a rich qualitative study of design in action at eleven leading global organisations.

The study looked at the way design is used in these firms, how designers work with staff from other disciplines and how the design process is managed to deliver consistently successful results. How is design managed across complex, global, product and brand portfolios … we asked leading design teams how they select and organise their designers, and when they bring designers into the product or service development process. We also wanted to find out what skills today’s designers need in order to succeed.

The Institute of Designers Ireland has published Why Design to give second level students a greater degree of familiarity with design as a study path and as a career. Supported by the Office of the Minister of Education and Science, the guide offers a ‘snapshot’ of design courses currently on offer throughout the island of Ireland; a taste of the richness and diversity of design education at third level throughout the country

Tracy Fahey, President of the Institute of Designers in Ireland, speaking at the launch, commented on the value of sustaining design education in Ireland.

Currently, in Ireland, there is a real impetus towards the sustaining of a research and development culture in Ireland. Design plays a crucial role in terms of innovation and development. A good design education teaches students to problem-solve, to think creatively, to research options, to develop and test designs and to respond to client needs.

Read the press release

Download a PDF of the guide (2.8MB)
or
Download a text-only PDF (214KB)

When I was a design manager, I always preached you could never go too far, only not far enough. By providing a range of concepts from close-in to further afield, you had a better chance of stretching your client to a more “radical” solution.

The nonobject Book is every designer’s dream. No clients. No customers. No limitations.

The principal objective of the book is to stimulate thought: What is an object? Why do we desire what we desire? Why has “functionality” been defined in such a historically narrow way? What is beauty? Nonobject is an attempt to free the imagination by disengaging it form the constraints of utility, economy and technology.

The site is worth a visit to see the preview of Tarati, a phone concept that highlights the magical empty space between telephone connections by removing keys and making dialing a function of passing your finger through the interface.

The title of the post comes from a Populuxe film from the 1950′s. My how far we have come …

The American Chamber of Commerce has published a strategic paper on creating an innovation and commercialisation base in Ireland. Entitled “Retuning the Growth Engine“, the paper sets out a blueprint for co-operation between the Irish government, Irish business and the base of US multinationals in this country in order to build an innovation base to underpin Ireland’s future sustainable growth. Last Monday the Irish Times provides a nice editorial from Jim O’ Hara, president of the American Chamber of Commerce Ireland, who believes the time is right for a new type of partnership between “Ireland Inc”, the Government, and the US multinational companies which have together and enjoyed such successful working relationships to date here in Ireland. Retuning the Growth Engine, sets out the American Chamber’s blueprint for this future success.

The aim is to create a “virtuous circle” built on positive action in five key areas: education, research, convergence, commercialisation and fiscal policy.This will not only help us retain the existing base of overseas companies located here but assist in attracting the next wave. US companies here are ready and willing to play their part with Government and all other stakeholders in meeting the challenges which face us and helping to create the conditions which will maintain Ireland’s economic success into the future.

This paper makes for very interesting reading in terms of America’s influence in our past economic success, problems with respect to eroding competitiveness, and how we can strategically position ourselves for future economic progress through sustaining important relationships with existing and new US companies willing to operate out of “Ireland Inc”.

It seems uncharitable to carp about such an extraordinary investment in the future of the country but I cannot help but look the proverbial gift horse of the NDP in the mouth.
In the race to invest in R&D it seems that we are forgetting one critical constituent; the user.

Much of the NDP builds on the foundations of the Strategy for Science, Technology and Innovation, an important but dull document. In so doing it focuses quite rightly on the importance of R&D, but as we have observed before, investment in R&D is not sufficient in itself. You need to find ways of making sure that the investment is commercialised in the best way.

Both documents continue to create a technocracy that ignores the user, the human element. Not a short term problem, but it will have an impact on our competitiveness in the long run if we cannot turn world-class R&D into attractive, desirable products and services.

Charles Leadbeater, all-round innovation and creativity thinker, and James Wilsdon, Head of Science and Innovation at DEMOS, have spent the last two years researching The Atlas of Ideas project with colleagues at DEMOS. In a strole of collaborative genius, the work was part supported by Tom McCarthy and his team at the Irish Management Institute. The study looks at the reality behind the hyperbole of Asian innovation:

We used to know where new scientific ideas would come from: the top universities and research laboratories of large companies based in Europe and the US. While production was dispersed among global networks of suppliers, it was assumed that more knowledge-intensive tasks would stay at home.

All that is changing fast. As globalisation moves up a gear, ideas are emerging in unexpected places and flowing around the world as easily as money and commodities, carried by mobile diasporas of knowledge workers.

This shift is most visible in countries such as China, India and South Korea, which are fast becoming world-class centres for research, particularly in emerging fields such as stem cell biology and nanotechnology.

Since 1999, China’s spending on R&D has increased by more than 20 per cent each year. India now produces 260,000 engineers a year and its number of engineering colleges is due to double to 1,000 by 2010. According to Thomson ISI, Asia’s share of the world’s scientific papers rose from 16 per cent in 1990 to 25 per cent in 2004. At the same time, there is a growing flow of multinational R&D to the new knowledge centres of Shanghai, Beijing, Hyderabad and Bangalore.

These shifts in global knowledge production are likely to be every bit as significant as the shifts in manufacturing that occurred in the 1970s and early 1980s. The big question is how we should respond. Some view Asia’s growing scientific strengths with alarm, fearing it will mean the loss of highly-skilled jobs in Europe and the US. But innovation is not a zero-sum game: more in Asia does not mean less in Europe or the US.

Alongside new sources of competition, the rise of China, India and South Korea creates new opportunities for collaboration. We need to develop better mechanisms for orchestrating research across international networks, and for directing innovation towards shared goals of development and environmental sustainability.

The thinking is challenging and nicely non-simplistic. Yes, there is a threat, but no, it is not as we currently perceive it and we should grasp the opportunities it presents swiftly and with determination.

The Irish Management Institute hosted a conference with this work as a focal point. It was really pleasing to see Martin Cronin, Chief Executive of Forfas, give a really considered response to the ideas in the report but my overwhelming impression was that our insularity will mean that there will be precious little impact in Ireland

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