Innovation Labs

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?
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