After working several months developing and improving a survey on design, innovation practices, and R&D, the past 25th March we finally launched it with the collaboration of Innovate UK in the “Creating Smart Products From Smart Materials” event held at the Congress House in London. This event led by Andy Sellars, Lead Technologist – High Value Manufacturing in Innovate UK, was a great opportunity to initiate the circulation of the survey.
Our objective with this survey is to reach a large number of UK businesses to explore how those businesses understand and use design, what are their innovation practices, their past performance in terms of new products and services introduced to the market, the levels of change achieved in their innovation processes, and finally in a broad sense what are the conditions surrounding the relationship between design and innovation in their organisations.
Following the strategy to distribute and promote the survey in close collaboration with Innovate UK we attended the “New Projects Workshop” the past 21st May at the Hilton Swindon Hotel. This event led by Paul Tuffs, Programmes Monitoring Manager in Innovate UK, marked the starting point of new projects successfully funded by Innovate UK. In this event we introduced and handed the survey to around 60 UK companies attending the workshop. In the next weeks we plan to continue the distribution of the survey and we hope we will start receiving back the questionnaires filled. The survey is available in paper and in an online version at: http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/1914989/Innovation-UK
Rachel Cooper
Emma Murphy
Dr Ricardo J. Hernandez