Design is a methodology used to solve complex problems, and to find desirable solutions for clients by integrating innovation. Design drives the innovation process, and hence sharpens industry competitiveness for Europe. It must be led by a vision that sets out to achieve extraordinary results, and realised by strategies that extract the most valuable assets of innovation, creativity, and design to propel EU SMEs to the next greater height.
Obtaining hard, comparable data and scientific evidence of design effectiveness is still the holy grail of many design researchers. However, the more design infiltrates all areas of social and business life and becomes a horizontal approach applicable to various activities, the more difficult it is to track and measure it as an independent variable. In an enterprise it can be applied to a single product or service development process, used as a function of marketing and branding or it can be part of business DNA or mindset and used strategically in all aspects of running a business. As observed by Jeneanne Rae ‘design is notoriously difficult to define, tough to measure, hard to isolate as a function, and tricky to manage, making it challenging for many non-designers to comprehend’ . Design can have different meanings to different audiences in various sectors and its scope also varies significantly in different languages and cultural contexts therefore getting uniform, comparable figures can be problematic. Fortunately, there is a wealth of good practice approaches and tips on how to address those challenges and get the information you need to learn about the current status of design application, its impact and based on that improve the use of design among SMEs.
Through DesImO implementation, the partners identified good practices of similar previous and on-going initiatives, researched on how they were set up, what data collection methodologies they applied, which were the advantages and limitations of those methods. As a result, a Design Monitoring Framework DOP was created to help other innovation agencies to monitor the level of integrating Design into business and its impact on SMEs. Having recognized the importance to try something before recommending it to others, the DesImO partners ran a tool testing in their territories making use of the monitoring framework and guidelines that were developed. Based on the results of peer learning and tool testing, they elaborated final version of DOP, with the aspiration that it becomes the ultimate guidebook on how to set up such an observatory from scratch.
