Design Policy Issues N° 4

Toward an European platform for design Policy. DeEP has finally delivered its objective. Understanding the efficacy of design in innovation policy is currently one of the challenges facing new socio-economic development in Europe. The evaluation of policies is an outstanding issue that is difficult to interpret, even in established areas like measuring innovation, where indicators and statistical models already exist. An important issue is therefore the lack of comparative data relating to design innovation and the almost total lack of data regarding the quantitative description of design policies in terms of outputs and outcomes. The main question leading the development of the DeEP Evaluation Tool has been: how to enable data comparison and allow evaluation of design innovation policy effectiveness? The DeEP Tool aims at collecting specific knowledge, albeit incomplete and imperfect, which can fuel a monitoring system for design innovation policies.This could support policy makers to collect data for macro and micro national performance using a web-tool which makes knowledge accessible to the European design driven innovation community. Design Policy Issues 4 describes the overall strategy, the approach, the structure and the main results of the DeEP Evaluation Tool, envisioning the benefits for the European Commission and the main answers to the European Design Driven Action Plan.