The book was published to mark the culmination and achievements of Design London 2007-2011. Directed by Leon, Design London received £5.8M seedcorn funding from NESTA, HEFCE and the partner institutions. The project undertook action research into interdisciplinary innovation, setting out to discover what was needed to respond to the challenges identified by the 2005 Cox Review of Creativity in Business. It led to a better understanding of how disciplines may work together effectively, avoiding simplistic importations of ‘design thinking’ in favour of a deeper mutual learning. The project implemented and refined those solutions leading to: innovative courses at Imperial College London (1,600 postgraduate students during the project, now 500 annually) and RCA (new Master’s in Service Design with Imperial College London); a new Chair in Design at Imperial College London; executive education delivered to 600 SMEs; an incubator for novel Intellectual Property. Ten new businesses applied the methods devised as a result of this research. These won the Dyson Award, the RCUK Business Plan Competition, British Design Award 2010 and Gates Foundation Award, as well as further NESTA funding. The model was disseminated internationally to help create similar centres in Qatar, Mexico, Helsinki and Cape Town.
Academic outputs by Leon and others were published in Academy of Management Journal; Information Systems Journal; Journal of Evolutionary Economics; Innovation: Management, Policy & Practice; Management Science; Long Range Planning; Organisational Research Methods. Leon presented research at leading academic conferences worldwide. A report on the UK designer fashion economy was produced for NESTA.
Dyson’s ‘Ingenious Britain’ report (2010) encouraged government to ‘learn the lessons from Design London…to examine how the model can be applied to other Universities, courses and incubators’. Cox wrote in the present volume (2011) ‘its significance goes well beyond the impact within its two parent organisations.’