- 1 - The Innovation Dimension: Designing in a Broader Context Dr. Leon Cruickshank Context The term “innovation” has become increasingly prominent in debates in government policy through the establishment of the new UK government department, Department for Innovation, Universities, and Skills (DIUS) and through reports such as “Innovation Nation.” 1 National funding bodies, such as research councils and the Leverhulme Trust, are emphasizing innovation through the “digital economy” and a corresponding prioritization in the design establishment through the activities and publications of the Design Council. These converging activities have highlighted the complex, overlapping, inconsistent, and incompletely understood relationship of innovation as used in design and innovation in the broader literature of innovation studies. Concentrating on the UK, this paper provides an indicative review of these fields and aims to achieve three goals: 1) Describe the wider academic field of innovation and relate this to a design perspective, 2) examine the connections, tensions, and synergies that emerge as these fields converge, and 3) propose active areas for contributions between fields. Many disciplines are active in innovation research, including management studies, economics, entrepreneurship, psychology, sociology, and, starting to emerge in broader innovation studies, design. The velocity of research, especially in the area of design and innovation, is increasing, driven by the developing needs of the digital or knowledge economy. Specifically, the UK government has committed to spending £3.5bn on innovation through the Technology Strategy Board (TSB). These initiatives were shaped in the UK by a series of policy papers, including: Competing in the Global Economy -The Innovation Challenge, 2 Creativity, Design, and Business Performance, 3 Innovation in the UK: Indicators and Insights, 4 The Cox Review of Creativity in Business: Building on the UK’s Strengths, 5 The Race to the Top: A Review of Government’s Science and Innovation Policies, 6 Innovation Nation, 7 and Creative Britain - New Talents for the New Economy. 8 In a European context an engagement with innovation is seen in an ongoing manner through the activities of Euro-Innova, 9 the EU’S innovation portal. This portal sponsors an ongoing series of activities, from conferences to innovation panels, that look at sector-specific innovation issues ranging from textiles to space to gazelles (fast-growing small and medium enterprises (SMEs)). There has also been a long-standing commitment to investigating innovation through the Community Innovation Survey (CIS), a Europe-wide survey to measure and analyze innovation activity in companies. This survey has been completed every four years since 1993, with the last CIS including responses from more than 140,000 companies.