Design guru and founder of the Red or Dead accessories brand, Wayne Hemingway, is in Dundee on Thursday, talking about his career as an award-winning designer for companies including Coca-Cola, Sainsbury's, Sky TV, Sony and McDonald's.

The lecture is part of Design In Action, a £5 million business improvement programme led by Dundee University Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, aimed at encouraging companies to incorporate the benefits of design thinking into products not as a last-minute add-on but "at the point of creation".

The four-year project, already-oversubscribed, covers rural economies, information technology, food, sport and wellbeing. It brings together manufacturers and other businesses with designers for three-day "disruptive thinking" sessions to produce original intellectual property that can be licensed back to participants, along with £20,000 of seed investment for each sector.

Already completed projects include work on interventions for diabetes sufferers and on the promotion of artisan foods. All the projects are all required to lead to commercially viable products.

Project director Professor Georgina Follett said: "Just as businesses tend to think about the consumer after they have had the idea, they tend to think of designers at the end of the process as last-minute titivation. But designers bring the consumer perspective with them.

"Designers like Wayne Hemingway also have a better understanding of market segments in terms of trends and age groups and understand cost and value. They are capable of bringing huge knowledge into companies."

Also involving Abertay, Edinburgh, Aberdeen Robert Gordon and St Andrews universities, and Glasgow School of Art, the project is funded by a £5m grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, supplemented by £400,000 from Creative Scotland.

According to a 2010 report for Creative Scotland, the design sector in Scotland employs 84,400 people.