EEDA - East of England Development Agency

New initiative helps small businesses lower carbon emissions

16 October 2009

An innovative new initiative from Cranfield University, Bedfordshire, is set to help small businesses in the East of England reduce the carbon footprint of their products and services by offering sustainable design advice and expertise.

Made possible with £815,510 of funding from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), which is managed by East of England Development Agency (EEDA), the Sustainable Design-Led Innovation (SDI) project aims to help 1,000 small businesses over the next three years. 

Martin Grant of Cranfield University commented: “SDI will collaborate with businesses to help them raise their knowledge and understanding of sustainable design-led innovation practices. This will help them identify new market opportunities and reduce the carbon footprint of the products and services they offer. It is also important that the sustainability of the products or services are measured and the programme will help businesses ascertain their life cycles.” 

David Morrall, European director, EEDA said: “With challenging government targets for carbon reduction businesses need to assess how they are going to innovate in all areas from operations and material selection to methods of business delivery.  Factoring in sustainable design processes will also help businesses be ahead of the game and is the key to success and growth. European funding, under the ERDF programme, is contributing to many projects to help small businesses address this issue and EEDA is very pleased to support the SDI programme in this important activity.”

The programme will incorporate on-line and off-line delivery methods such as knowledge transfer programmes, guided workshops and open innovation support network activities.  It is also anticipated that development activities will include benchmarking, auditing, CEO sustainable innovation leadership programmes as well as networking opportunities.

As part of the programme, business owners will also be able to harness state-of-the-art design innovation methods through access to the UK’s first national Centre for Competitive Creative Design (C4D) at Cranfield University.  C4D has recently been included in a BusinessWeek survey of the world’s leading business-design schools.

C4D aims to encourage students, lecturers, researchers and industry partners to explore creativity and use design-led innovation as a core driver to improve innovation and competitive practice in UK and global industries.

At a total cost of £2 million, it is expected that most of the businesses benefiting from the SDI programme will be totally new to support of this kind.

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