The Minister of Trade and Industry in Norway, Sylvia Brustad, recently announced design as one of her focus areas and grants the Norwegian Design Council 10 million NOK to initiate a design driven innovation program.

Even though it is not much, it is a very important sign in Norwegian politics. The politicians might finally have realized something our Nordic neighbours realized years ago. Design is about creating value and not just about styling…

Later this fall, the government will publish a white paper on innovation. In the government’s plan for innovation made in 2003 - design was hardly mentioned. And this was the same year as the Korean government launched their very own five year design strategy to increase the country’s GDP - with great success!

So here we are almost six years later with multinational companies around the world using design as a strategy in sharpening their competitive edge… Have Norwegian politicians finally gotten the point? And will they succeed in forwarding this message to business and industry? When Sylvia Brustad says she believes in design as an innovation driver - does she really mean it?

In an interview, Sylvia Brustad mentions products like the Tripp Trapp chair and Cherrox boot as good examples of design innovations in Norway. These are almost 40 year old products that represent the “old way” of thinking design. Sylvia Brustad needs new examples of design innovations! She needs examples that show the potential in design TODAY - e.g. service innovations that examplify design being used in developing immaterial values – in creating user experiences.

And as she needs new examples - Norwegian designers need the support in creating them. Use the 10 million for this! The Norwegian Design Council should initiate service design projects in our growing service sector just like the Danish government has done. This can improve our services and our design industry - they both need support in evolving….

I believe that the big potential for innovations are not in the Norwegian industry - it’s in the services!

Put that in the white paper on innovation!

Flew over Las Vegas a few months ago (landed there too) and got a shock as you do sometimes seeing a city from above. This picture shows just a tiny part of the area of the city, where two million people live. Looks like a city made by a harvesting machine - and 95% of inhabitants work in service or entertainment (not a lot of production going on there).

This city didn’t really exist 60 years ago. There’s a sci-fi feeling to it, maybe because we know that more and more people move to the cities to work in service or entertainment, as manual labour is taken over by machines.

It might well be a picture of our future seen from above…(and with global warming, maybe even the weather in northern Europe would become more like Las Vegas - one can hope:-)