Establishing and leveraging networks in design education innovation projects

Project networking is the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from individuals, groups and organisations external to a project's core team. The ability to establish and leverage networks is an increasingly important component of developing open innovation practices within many industries. This research examines the strategies and tactics employed by multidisciplinary undergraduate and postgraduate students to finding, forming and utilising idea-supporting networks. Three academic institutions, Northumbria University, Hong Kong Polytechnic University and The University of Technology Sydney, brought together a multidisciplinary collection of students and academics to explore hand hygiene solutions in their respective domestic culture and a foreign culture. While each of the student teams aimed to produce design research that uncovered opportunities for social benefit and profit, the project concurrently sought to explore two research questions: 1) what approaches to establishing networks in innovation projects emerge during a globally connected educational programme and 2) what value is leveraged to support project development? This research builds on work about Open Innovation Networks focusing on idea development and reports findings about innovation enhancement and innovation suppression that emerged as a result of distributed digital design research.