Post by Elisa Salvador, PhD, HDR

The #Design sector represents a pivotal yet underexplored component of the #Cultural and #Creative Industries (CCIs), playing a strategic role in fostering #innovation, competitiveness, and #sustainability across the broader economy. This new research article “When creativity meets innovation: the role of technology and environmental sustainability in the design sector” by Giovanna Segre, Martina Dattilo & Elisa Salvador, PhD, HDR, addresses this gap by investigating how creativity relates to technology, innovation and environmental sustainability within the Design industry. The article has just been published on the Journal of Engineering and Technology Management (JET-M) Elsevier Social Sciences and Economics Journals and it is available in Open Access here: https://lnkd.in/diZwHSxQ An original dataset covering a sample of #Italian design firms operating in 2023 is exploited and firm-level information are complemented with novel data collected through a web-scraping algorithm that identifies the presence and intensity of keywords related to #creativity, #innovation, #technology, and #sustainability on #designers’ websites. The findings of our analysis inspire three concepts as primordial and urgent for future policy strategies: the design industry deserves to be better supported through ad hoc education initiatives in particular about sustainability issues, protected through the adoption of a national policy of unique brands (e.g. EU Design labels), and valorised through a promotion campaign guarantying its unique production (e.g. EU advertisements’ Design promotion campaigns). By situating designers’ activities within the broader framework of innovation in the CCIs, this study contributes to highlighting the need for targeted support and policy attention to their role as a strategic component of sustainable development. Thanks to our original analysis, we hope to have laid the foundations for alerting about the necessity to preserve and better valorise such a unique #heritage. ESSCA, ESSCA Research, Università degli Studi di Torino, Naciba Haned- Chassagnon, Guillaume Schier, Philippe Mouricou, Guillaume Detchenique