The committee of the project, which is co-ordinated by the association ANCI Toscana, is made up by twelve partners of ten member states (town’s associations, university departments of architecture and design, business schools, service centres, and civil society organizations), among which the research unit Econcult of the Universitat de València can be found. The project has the specific mandate to distribute 1.5 million euros of its budget in favour of the fifty local initiatives in the member states and partner countries to show the innovation power designed by users. These funds will be distributed through open calls divided into three annual periods (once a year from 2018 to 2020) focused on projects which are still in process of conceptual development with the purpose of supporting its execution through financial resources and appropriate accompanying actions.

One of the first phases of the project will be to identify some of the experiences among the participant cities (Rotterdam, Athens, Copenhagen, Florence, Freiburg, Lisbon, London, Milan, Paris, Sofia, Stuttgart and Valencia) which fit with the mentioned concept of ‘innovations generated by the logic of design’. According to the professor Pau Rausell, main researcher of the project as co-ordinator of the Econcult group, ‘this project is further evidence, together with numerous actions and proposals which come from las Naves, la Marina de Valencia, La Agencia Valenciana de la Innovación, UPV or from several groups of the civil society, that Valencia is an integral part of the networks that lead the actions and reflections about innovation in Europe’.

The Econcult group has the task of leading the work aimed at developing recommendations and strategies of policies in a participative framework. Moreover, it will contribute to the identification of priorities, the detection of deficiencies and needs of collaboration and research, as well as the improvement of the quality, quantity and visibility of future political actions in the innovation field facilitated by design.

The innovation generated from the design logic can be considered, according to this team of researchers, as an example of innovation ‘inspired by the user’, where the participation of users is the central process since in most cases innovation can be more successful through co-creation. The thinking from the design perspective, focused on the user and the application of design tools and methods, when applied to services, systems and organizations it allows the structured innovation of business services and models, the organization innovation and other intangible ways of innovation, according to what they say. They add that the approach is focused on the application of tools and methods from the design logic since it offers a systematic approach to understand the innovations inspired by the user.

+ Info: http://www.econcult.eu/es/econcult-consigue-nuevo-proyecto-h2020-designscape-consorcio-europeo-alto-nivel/