Design is crucial to India’s manufacturing transformation. By 2020 India will need more than 60,000 designers in a 2.47 billion euros market. Progress to enhance design education is not uniform across institutions. Modern convergence of technology, design thinking, user-centred and experience design demand collaborative trans and inter/multi-disciplinary approaches to curriculum evolution. Bonds between industry and HEIs must be strong by growing collaborations for new product development, internships, joint projects and other educational and research activities. This project aims at establishing innovation capacities in the design sector of India through improved education built on transfer of good practices and curriculum content from the EU. It will establish 3 equipped Design & Innovation Centres in local universities. These will provide common ground, with industry, for (a) developing innovative and permanent methods for Research and Design approaches (b) establishing cross-sectoral projects for collaboration and co-learning, (c) establishing Inter-industry projects to facilitate the inclusion of design thinking approaches, (d) deploying extreme affordability principles, (e) developing community-based programs enabling designers, craftsmen and artisans, (f) modernization and internationalization of Indian HEIs by improving product and service design courses, following state of the art methodologies in design thinking, sustainability, social innovation, ethics etc.DESINNO seeks proliferation of similar centres in India and promotion of research and design projects by creating a permanent research innovation and training network and virtual tools. HEIs, researchers, students and industry are expected to benefit the most. The industry will gain access to modern value adding technologies, methodologies and highly trained professionals leading to drastic improvements of Indian Design for the benefit of the economy and society.