Innovation Labs

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.