department/unit: Hellenic Design Centre
services: HDC provides design services to startups, businesses and public sector organizations. Design is a problem-solving approach that can be used across the private, public and third sectors to drive innovation in products, processes, services and strategy by putting people in the centre. HDC offers “BusinessBoost”,a design support service that helps a SME to identify and solve its main challenges. B.B. has 4 stages: Empathise: HDC experts use a variety of techniques to fully understand the problem of the user for whom they are designing, through user research, observation, interaction and immersing themselves in their experiences. Next step is to synthesize the findings in order to form a user point of view of the main challenge. Ideate: HDC explores a wide variety of possible solutions through generating a large quantity of diverse possible solutions, allowing them to step beyond the obvious and explore a range of ideas, identify the opportunities and the obstacles of the challenge Prototype: HDC experts transform the ideas into a physical form so that they can experience and interact with them and-in the process-learn and develop more empathy. They try out high-resolution products and use observations and feedback to refine prototypes, learn more about the user and refine the original point of view. Implement: The best solutions that have been tested with the users are delivered to the client in order to proceed with the full-scale implementation of the solution.
previous experience: Some of KEPA’s collaborative projects: - SEE Platform – Partner. SEE Platform is a network of 11 European partners engaging with national and regional governments to integrate design into innovation policies and innovation programmes. - Design for Europe - Partner. Design for Europe is a three-year programme to support design-driven innovation across Europe. It is co-funded by the European Union as part of the EU's Action Plan for Design-Driven Innovation. The main instrument is a website platform with best practice case studies that demonstrate the value and impact of good design, learning materials and tools to help organisations embed design in their processes and thought leadership on the future role of design in innovation. Over 10,000 stakeholders across Europe are connected to the Design for Europe initiative. - New Innovative Business – Managing Authority of the Programme. The programme aims at creating the necessary conditions for creating new innovative companies of CCI sector. KEPA was in charge of designing, implementing and monitoring calls for proposals for SMEs through this programme. - OK!THESS provides a Co-Working space and support services to teams of people with innovative ideas, helping them mature towards their integration with the business world. - WORTH Partnership Project is about collaboration between fashion designers, crafters, technology providers and SME manufacturers willing to enter into a transnational partnership to develop innovative products by adopting new techniques and processes. WORTH aims to increase the added value and impact, through the combination of creativity, teamwork, and commitment. The WORTH Project goal is to establish connections across the EU-28 and COSME associated countries from different sectors of fashion and lifestyle industries, including fashion textile, furniture and home decoration, fur and leather, jewellery, footwear and accessories with the incorporation of emerging technologies. - RegionArts- It is a 5 years European collaboration project that aims to enhance the SMEs competitiveness by integrating ICT and arts to the business processes in order to create new innovative products and services. - CODIS- It is a European peer learning project that created a pilot design support programme for companies using Design Sprint Method.
