Design can transform businesses by triggering innovation and realising ideas in the form of products and services that delight customers. Awareness is growing all the time that businesses can achieve better results by using design as a strategic tool.
Ideaplay is an idea generating innovation kit for budding entrepreneurs. It's an A0 'tablecloth' with two different sides. One side is a storyboard innovation challenge - a game for up to eight budding entrepreneurs that can be used to sharpen and refine entrepreneurial skills. The other is a rich resource of information, techniques and case studies full of tips on how to spot and develop ideas.
Ideaplay is designed to be used in groups and is ideal for use in secondary schools, universities and workplaces.
www.ideaplay.org.uk
At the heart of this inclusive design education resource is a series of case studies drawn from the Hamlyn Research Associates Programme at the RCA. Each illustrates a particular inclusive design approach undertaken by a young designer in collaboration with a research partner drawn from industry or the voluntary sector.
The intention is to demonstrate how design practice across a range of disciplines can routinely adopt an inclusive approach if such factors are considered at the outset and user consultation is built into the development process.
www.designcouncil.info/inclusivedesignresource/
Design for All is about ensuring that environments, products, services and interfaces work for people of all ages and abilities. Design for All aims to bring together new and existing information, methods, tools and examples and make it accessible via a single user-friendly interface.
The Design for All website is for design students, their tutors, professional designers, design managers and policy makers across Europe. It was created to introduce newcomers to key concepts, examples and design/research methods, and to support practitioners in building up their own collection of tools and techniques. Originally developed by the RSA, Design for All is being developed further by EDeAN, the European Design for All e-Accessibility Network.
www.education.edean.org/index.php
The DTI's Living Innovation programme features video and text from the highly regarded series of innovation programmes broadcast, via satellite, to regional business audiences from 1997 to 2005. Each programme focused on a different aspect of innovation and brought together ideas and insights from successful entrepreneurs, including Sir Richard Branson and Sir Jackie Stewart, plus innovative companies, such as Innocent Drinks. The programmes present practical tips that can be applied in day-to-day activities.
The DTI's Living Innovation website (broadband)
The DTI's Living Innovation website (narrowband)
In 2002, the Design Council and the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) came together to launch Platform, a series of networking events to help design students prepare for life in a commercial world. The following year saw the start of Incubator, a scheme to help design students start their own businesses. The two projects grew from a belief that design graduates need a broader understanding of business issues than their courses currently provide, and from a desire to nurture their entrepreneurial instincts.
This publication captures the lessons from both initiatives, pointing the way to integrating business content into design education. It outlines the schemes' objectives and how they worked, as well as analysing how useful they were and presenting a number of case studies.
Download a PDF of Platform & Incubator
Meeting of Minds examines how business gains from working with universities and how universities gain from working with business.
Not everyone is convinced of the value of such co-operation, but from a national point of view, it makes sound economic sense, where possible, to pool the talents from both sectors which can often be working in similar areas without making connections. Meeting of Minds argues that collaboration between business and academic brains can produce uniquely innovative solutions.
Download a PDF of Meeting of Minds