Letting Go
March 24, 2007 – 5:31 pmOne of the major challenges for mentors on this week’s BBC Innovation Lab has been to get some of the participants to ‘kill their darlings’.
The ten teams for the Lab were selected on the basis of proposals submitted in response to a set of briefs from the BBC. Two people from each of the companies whose idea is chosen spend a week working with BBC staff and a team of external mentors developing the idea. At the end of the week, they pitch to BBC commissioners.
In a number of the teams it is clear that one member wrote the proposal and ‘owns’ the idea, while the other has less invested in the original concept. It’s proving very hard in some cases to persuade people to ‘kill their darlings’: they’ve put a lot of thought into their project before coming to the Lab and it’s difficult for them to back up and look at what they’re doing with a fresh perspective. Their partners, who don’t feel so attached to the initial proposal, are much more open to hearing criticism and reworking things.
It’s a significant difference between the Crossover lab, where people came as individuals and worked on ideas that they built from scratch at the event. In that situation people were able to be more fluid and open to change.
