The value of designs - "Design can deal a winning hand"

An article on the Packagingnews website of 5 June highlights the difficulties of measuring the value of designs and the perceived value to clients.
It is available at http://www.packagingnews.co.uk/news/814874/Design-deal-winning-hand.
It mentions the RODI – the “return on design investment”.
The definition of this term on the Design Council’s website (see http://195.157.47.227:8080/design-council/showGlossary.do#g17)reads as follows: “Similar to standard ROI (return on investment), RODI isolates the specific return on design spend. Although only one in eight businesses currently pinpoints RODI with accounting procedures, we hope that doing so will become more common.”

Further information on this intriguing ROI measuring tool can be found for example at: Design Council’s Value of Design Factfinder - http://www.designcouncil.org.uk/en/About-Design/Research/Value-of-Design-Factfinder/ - “Businesses which use design perform better than their rivals.”

or at

VMSD (the “leading magazine for retail designers and store display professionals”) - http://www.visualstore.com/index.php/channel/62/id/12874 - “It’s the holy grail of retail design: demonstrate the return on investment that retailers will net from the new store layouts they commission.”

And this is a link to the UK’s Design Business Association’s Design Effectiveness Awards page which explains the judging process of the Award: http://www.dba.org.uk/awards/judging.asp. It sets out details of how the Award judges assess the commercial impact of a design.
Unfortunately we have just missed the entry deadline for 2008 – next time lucky in 2009.