…a large number of universities start offering services in direct competition with the UK design industry, instead of focusing on core design teaching. However, they soon begin to realise that there is no benefit for them or their students in going down this road: not only are they failing to produce employable graduates for the professional sector, they are causing serious repercussions for local design businesses - and ultimately doing the UK economy no good into the bargain.

To put things right, they apply for, and are awarded, a grant to part-fund a consortium of academics and designers who would work collaboratively to deliver the necessary level of education and training to develop the next generation of design talent. Courses are built with a careful balance between intellectual, creative and practical study. Students receive regular input and mentoring from thought leaders and senior players in the UK design industry; and the best graduates are guaranteed a successful career.

… BDI was called upon to help a group of members whose local university had secured nearly £1m of funding to find latent innovation potential within local SMEs and then to take it through to concept design and prototyping. No market research had been carried out; no impact study had been done to identify displacement or duplication of services; and there was no consultation with any regional design or innovation consultancies.

To add insult to injury, the proposal showed no awareness of how modern British strategic industrial designers (BDI's core membership) actually work. Their core strength lies in the continuum of their service offering, from front-end innovation through to production and product life-cycle - not just in "down stream" product design, working to a narrow brief, as suggested by the university in question.

BDI submitted a complaint to the Department for Communities and Local Government. We didn’t criticise the quality of engagement that the university was proposing. We just clearly demonstrated that it had misrepresented the offering as being new and unavailable in the current marketplace. Our complaint was upheld.

This was the first time that we as an organisation had bared our teeth - and it just goes to show the power of a collective bite. The university was stopped in its tracks. The funding was put on hold and the university was given a few months to deliver a more satisfactory proposal in consultation with BDI.

There have been many such initiatives in the past - some of which are still running. The main problem is threefold: money has been available and readily on offer; the committees that approve the projects have little or no experience in the Industrial Design sector and accept statements of market failure at face value; and there hasn't been a strong enough professional voice to combat the situation. This would not happen to lawyers, engineers, architects or doctors. Their societies and associations would make sure of that. All the more reason then to join us!

We’ve seen different approaches where university-led initiatives have been co-designed and developed with the design industry; where private sector suppliers have been recruited against well defined criteria; and where metrics have been put in place to ensure that collaboration and referrals are part of the project outcomes required by those who monitor and provide the finance.

BDI is working with the Creative & Cultural Skills Council to clarify the skill set needed by modern industrial designers. Through the University Design Industry Partnership (UDIP), we are encouraging a constructive, in-depth dialogue between the two sectors to address the issues affecting the growth and quality of the design industry. But we need more universities to join the University Design Industry Partnership (UDIP) and more industrial designers to join BDI in order to reach a more substantive agreement about what designer education should contain.

It took a massive collective effort to improve our medal hopes after Sydney in 2000 to the fantastic level we achieved in London 2012. We can move similar mountains - but only if we all work together.

· Illustrated selections of BDI’s news stories and events are emailed direct to subscribers. For a free subscription, send a blank email with “Subscribe to BDI Broadcasts” in the subject line to [email protected]