Appendix: Education and Design Policies
The value of innovation has been recognized now by governments, and Verganti asserts that "many governments have launched policies to support greater use of design ... acknowledging its value and its impact on a country's economic growth." He specifically mentions the UK Design Council (established in 1944) and similar initiatives in other European countries as well as in developing markets in Asia and South America.
Government has long had departments and bureaus to encourage economic growth in critical areas: the department of agriculture, ministry of textiles, and other such government organizations seek to promote growth of industry, though historically it has been by establishing standards and encouraging the adoption of technology that has already been discovered. It is only recently that these organizations have recognized their ability, as a neutral party that is outside of the competitive battles, to foster and encourage innovation across entire industries in a collaborative manner.
However, it seems that these organizations are struggling to find an effective means of doing so. In most instances, they function in a manner that is similar to independent trade organizations: they provide a central repository of information, attempt to facilitate networking among practitioners, support education about design, help match people to projects, and fund independent research efforts.
The drawback is that while governments stand aloof from the competition among companies, they remain entrenched in the competition among countries. In essence, the Italian design council seeks to promote innovation for Italian firms as a means for giving domestic firms and advantage in the international marketplace. So governments are insular in the same way that individual firms are insular, just at a larger scale.
The design discourse, meanwhile, is global. Innovators communicate across borders and in many instances talented designers move from one nation to another - he returns to the figure at an Italian design firm that aggressively seeks to include designers from other countries, and 46% of its own workforce are non-Italian designers.
Markets are also going global. There always has been global influence - fashion designers in New York are inspired by the work of fashion designers in Milan, filmmakers in China look to American cinema for their ideas, and so on. But in the present age, both designers and customers communicate much more fluidly. Designers travel abroad to study, and consumers look to the Internet to see the latest trends in other countries instantly, rather than waiting months for magazines to introduce them.
There is the sense that design innovation can become democratic - given the ability to communicate to the global audience, there is the potential for designers and users to engage in constant, open, and borderless dialogue. The problem is that this potential is largely unrealized without leadership to foster and direct it to a specific purpose - in the same way that any organization (commercial, nonprofit, and government) harnesses and directs the collaborative power of people.
Where commercial organizations are concerned, their interest is clear: design innovation drives the success of the firm. Where government organizations are concerned, the interest is similar (the success of a national economy), but becomes diffused - so it may still rest on the commercial sector to drive design innovation across society, and the government sector may facilitate merely by staying out of the way: they cannot legislate innovation, but they can put in place policies that increase the ability of their domestic firms and citizens to be more innovative.