From Award to Impact

The effects of climate change are becoming more and more profound. With that also grows the need for the use of different kinds of raw materials: from single-use to renewable and regrowable, with a low carbon footprint and small climate impact. More and more industries and sectors are working on this material transition. In the creative industry, too, there is a growing awareness that this is necessary. This is evident from the many entries and awards won around this theme at, for example, Dutch Design Week, BAD Awards and WDCD challenges.

KEMs

In particular, the innovative frontrunners within design, fashion and architecture have embraced the material transition. Can this trend be drawn more broadly? Can the methodologies used by the creative industry for innovations also be applied in production chains, for example? This question is the subject of the New Marketing professorship’s research project From Award to Impact. Methodologies such as design thinking make it possible to combine practical-human, aesthetic and technological thinking with sustainability goals in the use of renewable materials. The creative expressions and Key Enabling Methodologies (KEMs) offer opportunities to loosen research and development processes within production chains from traditional methods and thus increase the innovativeness of these chains.

Research objective

The goal of this project is to design effective ways for creative interventions based on new insights and unorthodox models from the economic sciences. The focus is on interventions aimed at accelerating the sustainable materials transition. With this research, the researchers want to determine whether and how heterodox economic models can be used to work with creative designers, policymakers and stakeholders to develop new methods or broaden existing ways to increase the (environmental) impact of biobased solutions.