Towards a National Design Scoreboard: A Model to Enable Comparison of Performance between Countries

Recognising the growing importance of design at a national level, this paper reports on the development of a suite of measures relating to national design performance. These measures are based around a simplified model of design as a system at a national level, developed through a workshop with government, industry and design sector representatives. Detailed data on design in the UK is presented to highlight the difficulties in collecting reliable and robust data. Evidence is compared with four countries (Spain, Canada, South Korea and Sweden). This comparison highlights the inherent difficulties in comparing performance and a revised set of measures is proposed.