Overview & Core Activities
C4D was developed in response to the recommendations of the Government’s Cox Review of Creativity in Business 2005. The Review stated that Centres of Innovation Excellence should be developed to support multi-disciplinary courses combining management studies, engineering and technology and the creative arts.
Education, research and industrial services
The centre connects three levels of work. Masters Programmes give students a structured route into design-led innovation. PhD Research extends the same questions into deeper inquiry, and Industrial Services bring the findings to organisations that need practical results.
Because these levels share a common agenda, learning in the classroom can inform research questions, and research can return to companies as tested practice. This loop is central to how the centre sees its role across education and commerce.
About
The Centre for Competitive Creative Design site describes how the centre works, what it teaches, what it researches and how it supports business. This page gives an overview of the centre and the core activities that shape its work with students, researchers and companies.
Each section below follows one part of that work. The aim is to show how design-led innovation is taught, studied and applied in practice, and how the centre’s partners take part in that work.
Developing future innovation leaders
A core purpose of C4D is to prepare people who can lead innovation across disciplines. Graduates are expected to understand creative practice, management decisions and the technical constraints that shape what can be delivered.
The centre’s teaching and research aim to build that range of understanding. Leadership here is less about a single method and more about the judgement needed to bring design, business and engineering into productive agreement.
Design-led innovation practice
Design-led innovation starts from the needs of people and the possibilities of a product, service or system, and then works outward into business strategy and technical feasibility. At the centre, this approach is taught as a working method rather than a set of tools, so that students learn to frame problems, test ideas quickly and judge what is worth developing.
The method is also tested in live projects. Teams move between workshops, prototypes and conversations with the organisations involved, so that each stage of design is checked against commercial and social concerns before decisions are made.
Related Links
The pages below cover the centre’s main areas of work and the programmes that sit within them.
The Centre for Competitive Creative Design (C4D) is a collaboration between Cranfield University and University of the Arts London (UAL).
The partnership brings together two institutions with different strengths. The work sits where management, engineering and the creative arts meet, and it is built to serve both academic study and the needs of working organisations.
Working with the centre
Organisations interested in the centre’s work can follow several routes. Industrial Services cover collaborative projects, while the Design Incubation Unit supports early-stage design work. Each route begins with a shared understanding of the problem to be solved.
For general enquiries, the contact page is the most direct starting point. Visitors who want to learn more about the people behind the work can also review the team page and the education pages for course details.
—Core Activities
C4D operates at an educational, research and commercial level, integrating Masters Programmes, PhD Research and Industrial Services to synergise the learning and development possibilities that can be gained from exploring the crossover areas between, creativity, management, engineering/science and business practice. Its core agenda is to embed state of the art, design-led innovation thinking into current educational, research and commercial practice in order to facilitate the opportunities that exist in positive, sustainable, innovation.
Industry partners and regional SMEs
The centre’s partners include The NHS, Ford, Xerox, Imagination and Procter & Gamble. Working with large corporate businesses gives students and researchers exposure to complex organisations, long development cycles and demanding commercial targets.
Networks of regional SMEs bring a different scale of challenge. Smaller firms often need quick, affordable ways to improve their products and services, and the centre’s work helps them test new directions with a clear view of their resources.
—Overview
C4D has taken these recommendations and translated them into a world leading Masters Programme. This programme has strong industry links to both large corporate and SME businesses. The centre has been recognised by BusinesWeek as a world leading business-design school and its partners include The NHS, Ford, Xerox, Imagination and Procter & Gamble as well as networks of regional SMEs working with it.
The primary focus of C4D is embedding state of the art design-led innovation practice. This is developed through research and industry collaboration, within business and education to improve commercial performance as well as developing future innovation leaders.