Background report on Danish “Concept Design” study

Last week, I wrote about how Fora, the R&D division of the Danish Authority for Enterprise and Construction, had just published “Concept Design – How to solve the complex challenges of our time“, which presents a new type of company – the concept design company.

Now they also published a background report to that study.

The purpose of this background report is to map the growth potential of the Danish design industry. Is there a particular type of growth-oriented companies working with the combination of innovation and design? And if so what characterises this type of company?

The analysis shows that the design industry’s potential goes far beyond the traditional focus on product design. Design is an important discipline to concretise innovation and to create new products and services – this implies that the companies’ increased focus on innovation has opened new opportunities for the design industry.

It should be stressed that design cannot drive company innovation on its own. Other industries including advertising and consulting use disciplines that are important to the development of innovative solutions. Companies assisting other companies with innovation must therefore work with tools from various professional disciplines. These are the companies referred to as concept design companies throughout this study.

Chapter 1 highlights the general structure, size and importance of the Danish design industry and maps the Danish concept design companies. The chapter also introduces a point system for ranking individual companies in terms of their ability to carry out concept design.

Chapter 2 maps and describes internationally leading concept design regions and compares results from the Danish survey with the results from the international mapping. In continuation thereof the chapter compares the identified companies based on the system introduced in Chapter 1.

Chapter 3 describes a range of trends that impact concept design companies and their potential for growth. These trends include choice of business strategy, how to combine concept design competences and finally how large industrial companies are moving into concept design.

Download background report (pdf, 990 kb, 75 pages)