Leveraging European SMEs and Start-Ups competitiveness through design

Firms are increasingly investing in design and involving firms operating in this field in their innovation process. This research is based on an ongoing research project consisting in a complete range of free training courses - held in the main European cities - which main objective is to discover how design-driven innovation can become the key to improve European Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) competitiveness, efficiency and sustainability. It starts from the results of a previous work, that aimed at taking a picture of the design European trends. Keep the same research objective, in this work more updated data has been considered and analysed. Furthermore, more insights have been evaluated through the analysis of statistics and feedback. Hierarchical Cluster Analysis (HCA) has been used as learning methodology, in order to explore data and discover some hidden relationships between groups (countries and course modules). From this analysis, some considerations have emerged. Firstly, focusing on the countries, more interest has been shown by participants coming from Poland, Italy, Bulgaria and Spain. Furthermore, the most followed courses are related to the connection between product and services, global future trends and business models and design seen as shaping products. On the other hand, Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), Additive Manufacturing and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) were the less selected topics. Some considerations can be hidden behind these choices. Concerning the decision to select the Product&Service as a favourite choice, this could depend on the relevance that services are assuming nowadays. Concerning the design for shaping products, this choice could be related to the fact that this module represents the common meaning of design: the shape. About global and future trends and business models, companies have shown their interest in those topics because are considered highly relevant in order to understand the future challenges, implications and possibilities (related to the design topic) they have to face and how to address them. The less interest on the modules of PLM, additive manufacturing and LCA could be linked to the fact that those topics are seen more as supporting tools or methods by SMEs, helping them to improve design but not directly involved in the process itself. Finally, this work could be used by the European SMEs as benchmarking, in order to understand which design topics are covered by them and which not.