Special Features - Merging creative design with business

Providing a link in the chain - the C4D centre at Cranfield University will encourage the business and creative industries to work together.

Merging creative design with business
(04/01/08)

The UK's Cranfield University and University of the Arts London have joined forces to provide new opportunities for creative design and technology experts.

Funding of £3.5 million from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) will help create C4D - one of the UK's first national centres for Competitive, Creative Design.

Working together

The C4D centre, to be built on Cranfield campus, will encourage students, lecturers, researchers and industry partners to recognise the value of business and creative industries working together.

Through the collaboration, both institutions' expertise will be merged - Cranfield, famous for its engineering, management, science and technology skills; and the University of the Arts, London, specialists in design, arts and communication.

A range of new course

A unique Masters' degree in design, will be among the new courses to kick off in October, which will provide students with the chance to work in cross-disciplinary teams.

It is hoped the new C4D Centre will give birth to the "next generation of creative design experts working in the manufacturing, health, creative and telecom sectors."

Creative design in business processes

Professor Rajkumar Roy, leading the Competitive Creative Design Initiative at Cranfield, explained further. "C4D is about changing the way that Cranfield, University of the Arts London and the wider business community think about and use creative design capability to enhance competitiveness.

"This is an ambitious collaboration between two leading UK partners, as embedding creative design thinking in business processes is still a relatively new concept. The initiative is therefore timely and one that we anticipate will have the potential to greatly influence industry approaches and capabilities."

Reviewing the way we work

The Cranfield and University of the Arts London partnership emerged from the 2005 Cox Review of "Creativity in Business" which recommended that design be incorporated "into the heart of engineering, technology and management process to make a fully integrated product".

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