Innovation Labs

DEADLINE FOR APPLICATIONS ENDS TOMMORROW!

The deadline for applications is 5pm Friday, January 12th - ie tommorrow! We've had lots of ideas in so far, so keep them coming.

A few people have emailed me saying they'd heard the deadline had been pushed back to late Jan/Feb - this is not true, and I've no idea where that came from. The deadline is tomorrow, so get cracking!

Also, there might be a problem with the application form for some Mac users - if you're having problems, send me your application as a text document using the same format as the application form, and i'll add it to the system. If you send me an application that is not in that format, i won't be able to submit it.

Any other questions or problems, email me asap.

matt

Winners of 2006 Labs

The pilot Labs in Yorkshire, London and the North-West have all now finished. The Labs were a great success, with a total of 12 ideas getting further development funding and support from the BBC Internet commissioning team. In most cases this means funding and collaboration with BBC teams to build a more developed prototype that can be evaluated and tested in a BBC context.

For the BBC teams, the Labs has been a great experience, helping us build better relationships with indies across the UK, and with regional partners like North-West Vision and the London Development Agency. We're currently planning next year's Labs, and hope to include more regions across the UK. If you are a representative from a Regional Development Agency and are interested in hosting a Lab in your region, email Matt Locke for more information.

Yorkshire Lab Winners
Technophobia - Podium
Technophobia developed their idea for a micro-community archive space during the Labs, identifying a real need for minority sports organisations to increase their media profile online. The resulting project - Podium - provides a space for sports organisations to publicise their events and rising stars in the run-up to the 2012 Olympics.

Dubit - Catcher in the Rye
Dubit's project proposes a simple yet effective graphic interface for navigating links between BBC content and websites. During the Lab the team used user-centred design tools to refine their idea, building a richer understanding of how users navigate and share online content.

Synergy - Bleep
Bleep is a mobile application that lets users creatively mix archive sound footage and share it with other users. Synergy focused on the BBC context during the Lab, exploring the types of content that might be available, and how the idea could provide additional value to BBC audiences.

North-West Lab Winners
StarDotStar - iRadio
StarDotStar came to the Labs with a simple question - how can we make Radio as interactive as TV? They used the Lab structure well to fully explore this question, looking at how people's relationship to radio is changing, and the barriers to interactivity. Their final idea was simple and elegantly presented, and will be developed for trial during the Eurovision Song Contest

Reading Room
Reading Room's project aims to help users in their search queries by finding out more about why their searching for something, as well as what their searching for. Contextual search is an important area of research as we move towards an on-demand world, and Reading Room presented a well thought out and focused idea that will help the search team develop the BBC's search products.

ICDC - iTabloid
One of the three ideas from ICDC's business incubator, i-Tabloid was a well researched proposal to make it easier for users with poor literacy skills to navigate the website. The team clearly understood their target audience and the problem, and even brought along a test-user to help their development during the week. Accessibility is a strategic priority for the BBC, and ICDC's project will help us make our online content accessible to as as large an audience as possible.

London Lab Winners
Luckybite - CBeebies Kidsize
The luckybite team recognised that very young children have a problem using standard PC interfaces, and proposed a new model for kids interaction. A well researched and targetted presentation that address a real problem for the BBC internet team

Ymogen - Local Heroes
Ymogen came to the Lab with an interesting technological idea, but used the Lab to really understand user need, and ended up with a radically different proposal. Local Heroes uses mobile technology to help local communities support emerging atheletes in the run up to the London Olympics.

Poke/Amberlight - Courses for Horses
Poke also explored the world of contextual search, with a proposal to track users' 'taste buddies' via a limited amount of user information. They used the Labs participants for a live trial during the Lab, and demonstrated that their approach was truly innovative. The idea will now be developed as a concept prototype for the BBC internet search team.

Delib - AMap
AMap is a way of representing the range of issues around a particular debate, allowing users to explore different perspectives and understand what influences opinion on news items. AMap was a well-researched idea that needed to demonstrate exactly how users would access and navigate the additional contectual information. The pitch will be presented to BBC news teams for further development.

Headshift - Coolbooks
Headshift wanted to explore ways of encouraging users to Tag content. We're seeing a lot of tagging activity on sites like Flickr and Delicious, but will everyone want to tag? Coolbooks adds value to tagging for a specific community, in this case, teenagers. Coolbooks is a good example of how understanding users and audience helped develop an idea from a pure technological question to a fully rounded proposal

Limitless Innovations - BBC Keywords
Many of the projects we recieved for the Innovation Labs looked at tagging, but the few that we picked for the Labs added a partiular feature or idea that made them stand out. In the case of BBC keywords, the idea was mixing the BBC's existing formal metadata with user tags, creating a richer resource of metadata to help users find and share content.

So thats it for 2006 - we'll be launching the next Labs later this summer, so watch this space!

In the meantime, thanks to all the regional funders and partners, Frank Boyd and the mentors for making the Labs such a success, and all the participating companies for their time and energy. We look forward to seeing you next year!

Matt Locke

Aftermath

Fantastic we got a commission after a long, hard, but really good fun week.

The facilities that the BBC provided were great. We’d taken our baby along for the week (possibly not a great idea in hindsight) which made the week more interesting and everyone, BBC, hotel and the other companies made a real effort to fit her in. Thanks to all.

The day of pitching was pretty good I thought. Everyone was nervous, but it was good to see all the presentation come together and the quality of the work was very high. I thought that we were lucky in being one of the only applications that wasn't strongly tag based. It is amazing to see how much our original idea evolved during the week, a lot of which was down to the very good input from the mentors - we knew what we wanted to say but not how to visually represent it and they all put a lot of effort into helping us with that.

One thing I hadn't realised in putting our idea together, was that it wasn't enough to have a well reasoned idea that targeted a specific user group and addressed a BBC need. It was equally important that Jem learn something from spending innovation budget on the project. For those that go on the Labs next year, it's worth thinking about this, a couple of the ideas were knocked back for this reason.

It turns out that a lot of the companies at this year’s lab are in Hoxton/Shoreditch area, so I'm looking forward to the post lab piss-up (without the baby). Thanks to the BBC and all the mentors, we're looking forward to working with you.

Who would win in a fight between Walter Gropius and Darren Almond?

At Nico's encouragement, I thought I'd share some of my thoughts on the process we've just been through. As always with me, these come straight out of leftfield, but I'm hoping they'll contribute even further to the BBC's development of some cracking online tools.

• We knew, and were repeatedly told, it wasn't meant to be a competition, but the fact that only a handful of us were going to get a commission was always hovering at the back of our minds, especially when some of the ideas had a lot in common. (...she said TAG!) Generally I found all the teams to be incredibly helpful and fluffy, but some did more mingling than others. It would have been nice to have at least a day after the presentation when we could just hang out together in a relaxed way and kick around ideas with no agenda except mutual inspiration (Beeb included).
• It might be interesting to try a different way of developing ideas through the week, aside from a straight logical approach to user-centred design. Now, we all know how terribly important UCD is, but the kind of process we went through (in this author's humble opinion) tended to mould more standard solutions. I'd like to see what the labs might look like if a more playful route were chosen. Innovation driven versus results driven. The YBAs versus the Bauhaus. Almond versus Gropius. Or something.

I understand that the BBC has to be accountable for its output, and the "de Bono" approach to invention is much more risky, so I can see my thoughts might be a little controversial in this regard. Although, given the current propensity for success of content which doesn't (in the eyes of the top brass) address user needs in a logical manner, perhaps logic is just as much of a risk? (See Myspace, South Park, John Peel.)

Hey, just my £0.02. I'm still a long way behind the designers of the lab in terms of experience. Just kicking off the debate...

PS: I've just run Gropius and Almond through Googlefight and Gropius wins hands down! D'oh.

All over including the shouting

So, that's it. All done. Everybody's finished their presentations and found out what Jem Stone really thought of them.

rechord's idea got the thumbs down, at least for now. It was disappointing but expected. Past experience, however, teaches us that something better than we'd hoped for usually comes along right after such a disappointment. And we have a fantastic solution to take to other potential clients after the 3-month embargo runs out.

No post-match analysis would be complete without thanking our mentors, including Nico, whose wine we finished off without realising that it wasn't on BBC expenses, and whose sleep deprivation we engendered. I have no idea what we'd have done without the supporting characters of Plot, who kept us going when we despaired, and encouraged us at exactly the right moments. Thanks also go to Ben who was a major help, even after the base/apex inversion incident. We owe you all a pint (or 2, or 3...)

We'd like to offer a hearty congratulations to those companies who did attract a commission from the wonderful Beeb. You are all thoroughly deserving, and we are genuinely pleased and excited for you. Good luck, and let us know when the prototypes are finished because it will be great to play with them after such tantalising presentations.

Here's to next year...

hurrah!

just finished our presentation - phew!
It all went pretty well, though there's never time to cover all detail when you've got ten minutes to tell your story . ..
I'm now tapping away listening to Ymogen's presentation that's sounding pretty interesting so far!

videoblogging!

Petals of the What??

It's Day 5, where all the work we've put in hinges on our ten-minute pitch. This strange Geek Idol contest gets underway in fifteen minutes. We're on second, at 10:20am. We worked until nearly eleven last night, until our brains turned to cheese and started oozing out of our ears. In retrospect, maybe staying up till 1:30am playing Petals Of The Rose in the bar might not have been such a good idea...... but we had to unwind somehow.

It took about an hour and a half for people to get it, which appears to be about average. I love playing this game, purely to see other people going through the same process that I went through when I was "inducted", for the same sipmle pleasure of pitting your brain against a problem andn seeing which gives way first. So remember - if you know the answer, or you work it out - DON'T tell anyone else, just let it be known by giving correct answers, and next time you are in a gathering of geeks who need to unwind, you know what to do....

No rest for the wiki...

Sorry - I just couldn't resist. Like *that* answer to the pub quiz question "Which tube station name contains all of the vowels in the English language?" (cheers Ben) this stuff takes a long time to brew.

Timecheck: 1.13am.

The rechord team have almost finished and are about to hit the sack. Doubt we'll be able to sleep much with all the pent-up adrenaline floating around ready for tomorrow.

It's been a long emotional drop and then a happy climb upwards over the course of the week. Now, finally, we feel like the process has been worth it. Thanks to our lovely mentors, our idea is now substantially mutated and has been heaved out of its puddle, with some gleaming caterpillar tracks affixed. (It is of course an all-terrain commenting system.)

We feel like even if we don't get the commission, we'll still be very proud of ourselves, because, given the time and workpower constraints, we can't (currently) think of any way our proposal could be improved. It's been a 16 hour day, and we've worked our socks off.

Now, let battle commence... (all in a good friendly pacifist spirit of course).

Tom Cruise and aMap

It turns out that aMap has a great deal in common with the diminuitive A-lister . . . as after days of knocking our heads against walls it turns out that like Tom Cruise aMap "can't handle the truth"!

Arguments have now quietened down, and all is moving along smoothly. Perhaps if we'd invented aMap at the beginning of the week we'd have sorted out all our arguments alot quicker and saved some time . . .