The early stages of any innovation project are fraught with uncertainty and pose some challenging questions for innovators:

• Is the idea attractive to potential customers?
• Is it technically feasible?
• How can it deliver a great user experience?
• How can the idea be funded?

Ian Ferris from Brunel University, London, will describe how these and other key issues can be addressed with support from Impacting Business by Design, a new design support programme delivered by a consortium of three universities: Brunel, De Montfort, and Nottingham Trent

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The programme provides support for participants in three ways:

Access to professional design expertise to provide product design support to help with

• Design brief development
• Customer and user-needs research
• Generation and testing of product concepts
• User experience and user interface design
• Product design engineering and Design for manufacture
• Prototyping

Access to specialised academic expertise
Participants can be helped to access specialised expertise drawn from each partner university’s academic communities.

Funding Support is available
Design funding up to £60,000 is available in the form of a deferred repayment loan, only re-payable when the new product is generating significant revenues.

Free 1:1 Design Clinic

After the session, Ian and his team of designers will be available for a 1:1 design clinic. Here potential applicants or innovators can get feedback on a variety of design issues relevant to their activity