Unexpected Media

Innovation Labs

The pilot series of Innovation Labs has ended with nine companies winning commissions and another six or seven projects being referred to other budget holders in the BBC. It’s a much better result than we’d anticipated at the outset.

There were many other benefits to the process – to the BBC as well as the participants. In TV and radio there’s over 20 years experience of how indies and broadcasters can work together: the commissioners are well known, the processes are understood, the channels’ values and priorities are reasonably clear, there’s an effective trade association (Pact) representing the producers, and the technologies are comparatively stable. None of this is true for new media and, as the Labs progressed, it became clear that they were a valuable forum for building understanding between the BBC and potential suppliers.

The last of the three Labs was in some ways the most difficult. Although the teams were just as willing to collaborate and help out with each others’ projects, there was a sense of competitiveness that I hadn’t noticed in the previous weeks. I had expected some of the London teams to be more resistant to structured exercises: ‘too cool for school’ as Gill Wildman, one of the mentors, put it and I wasn’t wrong.

Across all three Labs, very few of the projects teams had a clear sense of who their users might be. We thought that they would benefit from spending one day of the five thinking about who they were designing for, when, where and how their product would be used. The London groups were more familiar with user-centred design techniques and working with personas; some were initially reluctant to use them. It’s noticeable that the projects commissioned in all three labs tended to be able to tell a compelling and clear story about who would benefit from their product. In some cases, like iTabloid and Luckybite, people were the starting point; in others, like Ymogen or Technophobia, they discovered them at the Lab. By contrast, many of those which weren’t selected had vague or unconvincing personas.

While the venue and structure are important, the success of any Lab (and these three were very successful) is down to the quality of the facilitation and mentoring. For this series I had to put together a new team, people with a background in product and service development, experience designers. The people I found were terrific and made my job much easier: I recommend all of them if you’re looking for people to help you design a product and ensure that it’s ‘people-shaped’: Matt Marsh of Firsthand Experience, Gill Wildman and Nick Durrant of Plot, Rachel Jones of Instrata, Kathleen Holman of Phunqube, and Tracy Currer.