By way of Icograda, we learned that The Design Council in the UK, a group that's committed to showing the important correlation between business and design, has just launched a big report/site to prove just that, entitled Design Fact Finder. There are all the facts and figures there, with things like "Use design in all stages of developing new products and services: businesses that did were twice as likely to see design contributing to growth by 2 to 1." It's a huge batch of data and case studies and pie charts and graphs and things. And they even explain how they reached all of their conclusion, by way of a page entitled "Detailed Research Methodology." In a field that seemingly has to justify itself to far more people than it should, even if you don't live in the UK perhaps this is the kind of thing you might want to hold onto in your back pocket the next time you're trying to talk a hesitant client into trying something new.