Abstract
Design has recently gained much attention among practitioners and scholars as a source of innovation. Firms are increasingly investing in design and involving design firms in their innovation processes. This research is based on an ongoing research project that consists in a complete range of training courses focused on design and has the objective to discover how design-driven innovation can become the key to improve European SMEs competitiveness, efficiency and sustainability. In the meanwhile, focusing on the project data, the main aim of the paper is to take a picture of the trends at European level with respect to the main design phases, looking at the modules proposed by the course. Accordingly, this work will allow understanding which is the knowledge (in terms of design) most requested by European SMEs. In order to perform a first complete analysis, we focus on hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA), which is a statistical method able to build a hierarchy of clusters. The goal of the statistical analysis is to try to discover some hidden patterns existing in the dataset, which connect Modules and Countries, in order to understand if some specific relationships exist.