Capacity building for design-enabled innovation in urban environments

Valencia's successful bid to become World Design Capital was inspired by the Designscapes project.

Acronym

DESIGNSCAPES

Reference code

H2020-EU.3.6.2.

Description

Innovation is relevant not only for economic sustainability, but also for social and cultural life. Therefore, creating an organisational climate that enables and catalyses innovation deserves special attention and should be explored from a sound operational perspective. Cities embody this organisational climate (Jacobs, 1969) and are, by nature, innovation generative systems.
From this perspective, the DESIGNSCAPES project aims to achieve a better uptake, further enhancement and scaling-up of design-enabled innovation in Europe, through direct financial support to flagship and innovation-generating initiatives, as well as a huge capacity building effort targeting multiple stakeholder groups (citizens, researchers, practitioners, innovators and policy makers).
The main features of the DESIGNSCAPES project are the following:

It is based on the generative potential of innovation in cities.
It leverages the concepts of Design Thinking and Design Driven Innovation as blueprints.
It focuses directly and decisively on the scalability potential of design-enabled innovation.
It proposes an original, holistic framework for evaluation, replication and impact assessment.
It uses a “supportive governance approach”.

Expected results include: a city snapshot tested in 10 countries and 12 cities, an EU catalogue of urban design-enabled innovations, training modules for local facilitators and innovators, policy briefs, e-publications and a final conference. Approximately 1.5 million euros will be distributed to over 50 new design-related initiatives, as required by the H2020 call, through three consecutive annual rounds of a three-phase technical and financial instrument, similar to the US/Netherlands SBIR programme and the EIC-SME instrument.

Developers of the project

Research Unit in Cultural Economics and Tourism (ECONCULT)

www.uv.es/econcult

econcult@uv.es

Keywords

innovation, cities, sustainability

UV work equipment