Innovation Labs

TechnoPhobia's take on leaving the labs

We have left the BBC Innovation Labs and returned to the status quo with some great experiences under our now stretched belts and having learned a great deal about ourselves, our idea and the BBC.

Throughout the week the mentors' input was invaluable to help turn our seedling idea into a tangible concept - we can't thank you enough. It was a pleasure to work within such a positive environment and the fact that so many great ideas were established by all companies is testament to this.

We were lucky enough to have had our idea selected by the commissioners and now look forward to working with the BBC to develop it further. Apparently Saul's long, flowing golden locks mesmerised the commissioners during the final pitch (see exhibit A - http://www.flickr.com/photos/93727562@N00/110448807/).

Save9 – Yorkshire BBC Innovations Labs 2006 – insider’s mini-review

Summary: The BBC is intent on transforming how we access their online resources, by encouraging innovation from creative technologists and new media companies - delivered via three five-day residential rapid prototyping labs.

Location: Swinton Park – a luxury castle hotel set in 200 acres of parkland, lakes and gardens – near Masham, North Yorkshire. The castle is surrounded by an estate in which guests have access to rivers, reservoirs, moorland, dales and beautiful countryside bordering the Yorkshire Dales National Park.

Dates: 6th to 10th March 2006

Five intensive days (and four late nights) of brain-storming, market research, prototype/concept development, end-user profiling, mentor meetings, group meetings and ‘run-thru’ presentations culminated in a 15 minute pitch to two BBC commissioners (Jem Stone and Jason DaPonte from the BBC internet commissioning team).

The mentors made the difference between a good event and a great event. A well-trained and highly motivated team - they kept the energy up and the attitudes positive. Daily briefings were a must - reminding everyone of their goals, the key messages and helping us all to make adjustments where necessary.

Reminiscent of BBC TWO’s Dragons’ Den, where entrepreneurs pitch their ideas to secure business funding, each team’s Friday presentation was the climax of the entire event. Although ten companies were invited – not all of them, including Save9, walked away with a BBC project commission on the final day. The lucky few deserved their accolade – they delivered great pitches (some very entertaining) and innovative ideas that had to be explored for their potential.

I’m sure most of us came away with much more than we had expected; a great experience, the kudos that comes with working with the BBC, some free publicity and business contacts that will hopefully last for years to come. A major bonus of the Yorkshire Innovation Labs 2006 is that each team will also be invited to another BBC workshop to pitch to venture capitalists and business angels - for exploring other development opportunities and financing.

In summary this was a significant event for new media companies in Yorkshire such as Save9 – with the BBC clearly demonstrating their interest in the creation and growth of new media talent within our region.

DESQ’s Day 5 and Beyond

So, back at home with time to reflect on the 'lab experience', my trusted labrador by the hearth, the embers rising. We didn't win the BBC cash commission prize but we hope to get introductions into the varied and numerous corridors of licence fee land to find the right person to take our idea forward.

Our idea, due to be birthed in the morning of Day 5 took somewhat of a U-turn at about 6.30pm on Day 4 when we read the press release for 'Get Smarter in a Week' and realised that our baby was going to be too close to someone else’s. We'd been pipped to the post by Michael Aspel and Saturday night red button light entertainment. Doh! We couldn't see a beeb exec - with or without a soaking of Chardonnay - commissioning something so close.

So, we had the night and a few hours in the morning to put together Plan B. Over dinner, we stormed an idea we'd 'parked' earlier in the week and did a quick and dirty impromptu pitch to Frank and Rachel before retiring to bed for a early night. Getting up whilst the lark was still tucked up in its nest, we refined the idea and put together a presentation in the lab time we had left. With the clock tick-tocking, we presented what I think was, in the circumstances, a pretty decent proposition. Without a doubt we'd applied the processes we learnt in the lab and put something together with audience and their needs in mind.

My recommendations for lab virgins. #1. Research - make sure your idea is unique or takes a fresh twist on something that's already popular or that's just emerging; search the BBC site and your preferred search engine high and low for similar projects. #2. Get to know your trusted Volvo; look at the BBC's core values, what it wants to achieve and what it has to do to comply to its public broadcaster remit. #3. Get into the head of your target audience, live their lives, be them for a day. And if you haven't got an audience in mind, by heck, refocus so you do.

Monkey tennis anyone?
http://www.davidsquire.co.uk

Timetable for final pitching

The final day has arrived! After all the hard thinking and building of the last week, today is dedicated to the final pitches. Each team will have 10mins for the final pitch, presented to Jem Stone and Jason DaPonte from the BBC internet commissioning team, and to the rest of the group. There's 10mins for feedback after each pitch, then a wrap-up at the very end when Jem & Jason will say what projects they are interested in commissioning for further development. Regardless of the outcome today, every team will be invited for another day workshop with representatives from VCs and Angel investors, to explore other development and financing routes for their project.

Here's the schedule for the final pitches today:

10:00 Dubit
10:20 Gamesauce/Firesoft
10:40 DESQ
11:00 BlinkMedia

11.20 Coffee

11:40 Synergy
12:00 Sense Internet
12:20 Technophobia

12:40 Lunch

14:00 Save9
14:20 Beacon-Dodsworth
14:40 Quba

15:00 Commissioners' decision making time
15:30 Commissioning announcements and wrap-up
16:30 Close

Back in Huddersfield

Leaving the luxury of Masham for a day in Blink's Huddersfield office I find myself in the position of remote worker in a rather more stoic working environment. It is amazing what only three days intensive development can do to an idea we only instinctively believed had potential. It seems that working well away from the endless day-to-day distractions can actually save time, give you a mental work out and as you start to know your idea inside and out, challenging it from every angle you grow in confidence with the strength of your idea. For a small team it isn’t always possible to schedule this kind of intensive session into the year but having regular time out to think is definitely the way forward for us as more progress on Anywhereblogs has been made over that last three days out than in the last five months in. See you all tomorrow for the final furlong.

Must -try Harder

The question that really threw me in our first meeting with Jem and Jason from the BBC was "So, what is it?"

I wasn't sure whether to try some airy description of the concept and what it might mean (I might have got away with that at a technology art conference, but the question and the context seemed to deserve a better answer), or let Pete chip in with something about the technical nuts and bolts.

We talked to Stuart Nolan about this afterwards, and after a while we came up with the line "It lets you get and add comments about the place you're in."

That seemed good enough, except that there is something about the word comment that sounds a bit one-off, not very active, and even a bit knit picking.

I thought it might be worth adding -tary.

Commentary makes me think both of a commentary to a book - extra information, useful facts, clarifications - and also the sports commentator, "they think it's all over" kind of exclamation, lasting for a period of time during an event. Those senses of commentary fit with some of the many ways people like to use their mobile phones.

Maybe that's what it is, a kind of two way (or many way) ongoing commentary organised around places. Maybe.

Note to self. Never put pun in title without checking spelling first.

Day three: bleep mobile - Sonic Game Play

We’ve had the legs pulled off our idea, poked it in the eye and kicked it around the room a bit. The good news is with a bit of first aid from the lab it’s almost fully recovered and ready to venture out into the world again.

There’s been tons of useful stuff this week particularly ‘good cop – bad cop’ where you get to pummel someone else’s idea – put it back together and present it back to them.

One of the disciplines we’ve found useful this week is to describe a typical user for your idea (age, likes, dislikes, how they use technology etc) and then write a story about how they experience it.

Once you start presenting that story to a range of different people you quickly discover the strengths and weakness of your approach and identify the areas you need to work on. There’s no doubt this has helped us hone the idea.

ps thanks for the strap line Ian, we’ll keep you posted.

Tim & Cliff
http://www.synergy.tv

Schedule for Day 3

The focus for day 3 is to continue to develop the idea, focusing on the NABC pitching technique. Today and tomorrow will be very unstructured, giving each team lots of free time to really knuckle down and work on their idea. We have a new mentor just for today - Ian Anderson from Designers Republic - and he will be available for booked sessions or casual feedback throughout the day.

Jem Stone and Jason DaPonte from the BBC internet commissioning team will arrive today at midday, and will be around for consultation until the final pitches on Friday. We've timetabled 20min slots for each team with Jem and Jason this afternoon. This will be the only structured time you have with them - other than that they're around for informal chats. Here's the schedule:

14:10 - Technophobia
14:30 - Save9
14:50 - Synergy
15:10 - Dubit

15:30 - Break

15:50 - Desq
16:10 - Gamesauce
16:30 - Blink

16:50 - Break

17:10 - Quba
17:30 - Beacon Dodsworth
17:50 - Sense Internet

TechnoPhobia's Tuesday

It seems to be all hell-for-leather at the moment but we've managed to find five minutes to relax and reflect! You really do live and dream your idea at the iLabs and we've had so much time to think about our proposition in great depth and also get into the heads of our users too.

We found yesterday that it really helps to take half an hour to go for a walk around midday and change your surroundings otherwise you can develop a one-track mind.

Amongst other things we've learned a great new buzzword - “Snacking.” In the context of... “Simon generally visits the BBC website to snack on news content.” This was one of the terms used to describe web user behaviour in terms of how they browse and search the web and we liked it!

DESQ - circa midway - how's it going?

There's not been a great deal of free time or blog time in the last 48 hours or so and I don't expect things to alter, so I'll try and make a couple of entries to record and reflect on the ta-da 'lab experience'.

We're here (that's me, David Squire and my esteemed co-collaborator Stuart Nolan) to try to create something that draws on our collective experience in thinking about games, the aging population, play, enjoyment and enrichment. We're also here for the ride, for me to learn more about pitching and about how to develop an idea better and for Stuart to apply his thinking on play and games and to do some magic tricks of course!

The feeling of being on a roller coaster comes partly from the relentless but exciting pace the lab operates on - despite the vast amounts of food available, I can't imagine Matt, Frank and the mentors piling on the pounds - but also because your feelings towards your project/your baby alters every couple of hours or so. One minute you think you've got it strapped, you've found the killer app, the next it's back to the drawing board and you're down in the doldrums.

The premise of shaping your idea around Needs, Approach, Benefits and Competition helps. As you think more about your audience's needs and their journey, your idea starts to reshape into something far more interesting and more considered. I must admit I was somewhat sceptical about spending an entire day on 'who's your user?' but having someone in mind (from usual demographic profiling to how their average day pans out) really tunes you in on how people use interactive content and what they want from it. If we get this bit right, the rest should follow on nicely.

I'm sure everyone here would admit that the fact this is a competition with the potential prize of a commission is in the back of your mind all the time. But what's great and amazing, in an increasingly competitive marketplace, is that people are genuinely helping each other shape and focus the development of other people's projects. We must have pitched our idea now 3-4 times over the first 2 days, and the response, feedback and interest gets more helpful and more heartfelt each time.

Luckily, and despite a little gushing there, we're managed to avoid any hippy bonding exercises - things that involve having to close your eyes or pretend to be someone (or worse something) else. Thank the DG for that!

So, as the dawn breaks over the misty hills of Masham, its day 3 in the Swinton House.