Interview with… Harry Kerr

Our latest book, Optimism, is filled with stories of innovators who are transforming businesses and changing lives for the better. It’s a road map for anyone who dares to dream and has the courage to act. Take a look at our interview with Harry Kerr, Head of Design at Innovate UK.

“If you want to disrupt, you need to design — and the UK has a unique innovation ecosystem for SMEs, with design at the heart of it.”

As Head of Design at Innovate UK Business Connect [part of UKRI], I’m at the business end of design. I’m not a designer by background, though. I was interested in what you might call social technical systems: how do we understand the systems in which we’re operating and how do we innovate and keep refreshing and innovating those systems? That led me to doing an MA in History then I got a job at the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), where I managed its design research portfolio.

Through that I got interested in how emerging design practices applied in the real world. So I joined the Knowledge Transfer Network (now Innovate UK Business Connect). I’m very interested in pulling out academic research on design systems and articulating it for businesses to use in practice.

Innovate UK helps businesses use design more effectively. Currently we’re uniting a complex system of organisations under the Innovate UK umbrella, including Business Connect, Business Growth and the Catapult Network. As Head of Design at Business Connect, I have a part in unifying the expert design capabilities that we have in our ecosystem, to make it more strategically powerful and coherent, and I find that really exciting.

My team helps businesses embed design into their innovation processes. We have to understand where they are in their development and what kind of design they need. Our aim is to lower the perceived barriers to design. Design terminology, for example, is often quite poorly understood.

Design is often seen as a bolt-on at the end of the product development process. Our approach is to help businesses understand design more holistically. One of our main jobs is to articulate design as a capability rather than as a specific stage in the process.

We do that through various forms of engagement and funding. We incentivise businesses to partner with designers to do innovation through a design-led lens, with incentives ranging from ￡40,000 up to ￡3m. We also help them gather evidence of the value that design adds, so they can justify further embedding the capability into their businesses.

Design is inherently disruptive, but it’s not just about overturning the apple cart. It’s about making sure that what you’re doing works for everyone. By putting people first and working with provocative, curious designers, you can contribute, respond and reduce the risk of stagnation. Stagnation is a dangerous situation in business.

One of the hardest bits of innovation is consciously building in room for risk taking. Risk is a difficult word. It immediately brings up RAG (red, amber and green) statuses — mostly the first two. But risk is about experimentation and being able to fail, and fail usefully. That’s part of the journey to something that’s a really good offering.

If you can build in time and permission to fail, from the top down, it enables the whole organisation to learn in a collaborative way. That’s easy to say but much more difficult in practice. You need that leader who is a champion for design-led approaches.

Design for Growth (DfG) is an Innovate UK Business Growth initiative run in partnership with Magnetic, coaching SMEs in using design as a core capability to grow. We chose Magnetic as you’re truly design-led. You don’t just talk about design. It’s core to everything you do, with an extraordinarily agile and collaborative way of working.

Too much of our work these days has to be formalised and standardised, especially in large organisations. Magnetic has a proven, dynamic process but your approach is informal and energetic. When you’re in the room with businesses, it’s light touch. It gives people time and space to talk quite loosely, and then build their thinking into more formal ideas.

We’re in a period of distinct opportunity for design expertise and there’s a sharp focus coming up on UK design, with the World Design Congress coming to London in 2025. We’re partnering with the Design Council and AHRC to host it.

“One of the hardest bits of innovation is consciously building in room for risk-taking.”

The UK has a public funding system that explicitly acknowledges the power of design, and that’s rare. We have a powerful system of innovation programmes, with support funding, loans, labs and Design for Growth. It’s special and it sets the UK apart. It’s going to be exciting to showcase that.

Case study for Innovate UK

The challenge: How to embed design into high-growth UK businesses, to help them realise their potential.

Our solution: Run a unique design coaching initiative, Design for Growth, providing flexible 1:1 support and practical design workshops.

Impact*: DfG is supporting businesses to grow through improved design and better understanding of the design process. For the vast majority, employment and turnover have already increased or are expected to increase in the near future.

This is an excerpt from our 2024 book, Optimism. If you’d like a copy, request it here .

*Source: independent evaluation by Amion, April 2024

Interview by: Toby de Belder