Funded under the ‘first action plan’ of the European Design Innovation Initiative (EDII), DeEP aims to create an understanding of the impact of design innovation policies by building frameworks and indicators to evaluate these actions both at a macro (regional, national, European) and micro (specific initiative) level. The key points that the project is addressing are:

• to identify and understand the presence of tacit and explicit design innovation policies in Europe;
• to develop new indicators that can be used to measure the impact of design innovation policies both at a macro and micro level;
• to activate a process of mutual learning and transnational cooperation in policy development by identifying and sharing good practices, evaluating their impact and testing their transferability;
• to create an open platform to stimulate and support the exchange of knowledge within the partnership as well as with other external stakeholders;
• to actively disseminate preliminary and final results (throughout the duration of the project) to the European Commission and EDII Secretariat, and to all interested stakeholders (researchers, managers, SMEs, policy makers).

The deliverables that will be developed are:

•  A taxonomy of Design Innovation Policies;
• The DeEP Evaluation Tool made of: (a) a Design Innovation Scoreboard to evaluate regional and national performance (set of macro indicators); (b) an analytical framework and indicators to evaluate the impact of specific initiatives directly on companies (set of micro indicators);
• An open platform for knowledge sharing (online repository of Design Innovation Policies) and for evaluation (web based evaluation tools)

See http://www.designpolicy.eu/ for further information.