Innovation Labs

Results from Southern England Lab

At the end of the Southern England Innovation Lab 2007, the following teams were selected for further development by the BBC commissioners:

Flockr - Future Platforms
Your Local - Hinterland
Concept Search Engine - Broadsight
Be Olympian - Persuaders

In addition, the projects developed by BDH and Panlogic were invited in to pitch to Radio 1 commissioners, who couldn't make it to the Lab that week.

Congratulations to all the teams above, and to everyone who participated in the Lab!

Headlining

Final day
Breakfast was a sombre affair and clearly most of us had very little sleep, we could barely grunt at each other. I spotted Remo and asked him what time he went to bed- 7am he replied, it was 7.45am. As the pressure mounted we checked out of our rooms and discovered that we on last, fearing that we were going to have a lot to live up someone changed our perspective by suggesting that we had the headline spot.

Some truly creative performances followed, we laughed and were delighted at how the projects had shaped up over the last few days. Whether it was Post It Notes, sandwich boards or bloody fully engineered computer programmes from Broadsight [amazing guys well done] everyone had a great time telling their stories.

Finally our turn came; we don’t remember much other than it got funky.

An idea too big for the BBC alone, lets see……… you can stay connected as to how our project is shaping up on our blog here.

Thanks everyone it was emotional,
Stay in touch, Steve & Fitz
www.persuaders.co.uk

Day 4

Today is rehearsals; we don’t know what Jacks Tee shirt says today as we can hardly see we are so tired. We spend all day finalising our ideas and don’t get time to rehearse anything. We stumble through with a lack lustre performance and to our surprise everyone in the room gets it! Because we now really believe in our idea and have so many areas covered other people believe us too.

With a sense of ‘our work here is NEARLY done’ and truly shattered we head for a post presentation analysis………….. in the Jacuzzi to work out the next phase.

Another late night was to follow, sketching out the plans and sharing them with our mates Simon and Rupert from Designers Ink. We finally gave up in the early hours and headed to our rooms where we rehearsed by playing the blues on Fitz’s bass guitar, this led us to another idea which meant we now had to remix the whole presentation. We later find out that this kept one of the commissioners awake; if you are reading this we are sorry it was the adrenalin of it all.

I never finish anythi….

Day 3
I never finish anythi….

Jacks Tee shirt once again sums the start of our day up, the commissioners arrive in a few hours the suns out and its time for the post it notes to return with vengeance. Homework needs to in by 11am so we have better finish it.
Blimy 10:50 and that’s it! Our homework to our surprise brings the last couple of days together for us, nails the idea and gives us a real sense of purpose.

Claire our commissioner makes a real impression on us and understands exactly what we want to achieve and genuinely seems really excited about our plans. This galvanizes our passion and spurs us on and we reward ourselves with a nice single malt, but there is a still a long way to go.

Meh……

Day 2

Meh……Jacks Tee shirt from FuturePlatforms sums up how we feel today especially as Fitzroy insists on a 7.30 pre breakfast meeting each morning. At 9am sharp we start off again, kicking and screaming we are dragged through a series of exercises with the mentors that we don’t really want to do, we just want to focus on figuring out exactly what our idea is and they seem to be very good at distracting us from this…lets just go with it. As it turns out that this is exactly what we are doing, we just don’t quite realise it yet

More presentations are to follow, but how can we dramatise an idea that we have not pinned down yet. Needless to say that although Fitz played a 14 year old girl very convincingly we were annihilated- but in a nice way, and they were right! ……..

Time to take the idea apart, get to grips with it and put it back together. But when are we going to be able to do this as its 7pm, time for dinner and then there is more homework to follow! Our families now report us as officially missing. Have we really only been here 2 days?

Whats this all about then?

Colleagues’ friends and family asked, so what will you doing at Innovation Lab?
Well….. thinking about stuff was our reply. Sounds easy, nice hotel a gym a swimming pool and good food. Leaving our young families’ behind- in my case a 12 week old daughter we expected a relaxed break ‘chatting’ to likeminded people and hanging out in the bar.

How wrong we were.

Day 1

Yes and…..
We arrive nice and early and meet our new friends from 383 Project over coffee and croissants, due to TomTom we are not quite sure where we are but we do know we can not see the sea.

As more of us arrive it is clear that there is a wide variety of people and skills here, thankfully most people seem as unsure as us as to actually what their big idea actually is. This is a problem as we are presenting them in just a few hours! What’s more there will be no time to think about them as we have a whole load of stuff to do first.

After a very agreeable lunch we all take it in turns destroying each others ideas, not a great way to make friends we think- but actually the reverse becomes true

We finally break at 7pm for dinner where we are given our homework! This needs to be finished by 9am so head fizzing, buzzing and spinning a full 360 I managed to crawl into the sack in the early hours.

The evolution of an evolutionary system

An intensive 4 1/2 days of taking our original system concept - a "memetic difference engine" - into these labs and having it kicked and pummelled into shape - innovation may be about inspiration and perspiration, but there has also been quite a bit of sleep deprivation too.

We have talked a little more about what our particular project is on our own blog at Broadstuff, if anyone is interested.

What has been interesting about the week is seeing the range of other ideas, the range of skills and talents that the rest of the participants have to share, and the infectious nature of creativity being unleashed.

All in all a great experience (not always fun, but always useful), we have met some most excellent people and had some amazingly insightful conversations. In fact, as a process alone it has much to recommend it. And it has forced our ideas forward far faster than otherwise.

2 days down!!!

The first couple of days here at the lab have been a real experience. Turning up with very little pre-conceived idea of what our 'thingy' would be, beyond what we had written in our initial application has proved really useful. Through a process of bashing our idea around with the other other teams we spent Monday re-assesing what the core fabric of what we wanted to achieve was. Tuesday, would prove to be all about how we were going to achieve it. Through the incredibly useful (but frequently frustrating) process of inventing users and user scenarios we came up with three likely users - to add familiarity we named them Dave, Claire and Dan. It's been a rollercoaster trip with them so far! Yesterday morning they seemed quite approachable, but by yesterday afternoon Sukhi and I would probably have killed them had we seen them in the street! Fortunately this morning, the dust has settled and our idea has come out the other side looking much healthier! Watch this space to see what happens in the next couple of days (ad if Dave, Claire and Dan are still our friends come Friday!!)

Working hard in the conservatory

I promise the teams are working hard, we're all sat in the wonderful early spring sun, either under sun shades outside or in the relative warmth of the conservatory; the creative juices are flowing.

Over the last couple of days I've been wonderfully surprised and refreshed by the ideas coming out of this lab. Most are totally unique and have a deep insight into some of the problems that face the BBC at the moment. All of the teams are being really receptive, and at least two have totally changed direction since getting banged around by the other teams and mentors - it's amazingly energising to see ideas grow, get beaten up, grow more, iterate and then flourish into something that makes you go, wow. But not in the Windows Vista way.

Matthew Cashmore

Southern Lab is under way...

Hot on the heels of the London Lab last week, where 4 teams got invited for further development, we're straight into the fourth and final Lab of the 2006/7 programme. We're in MIdhurst, W Sussex, with 10 teams from across the South of England. This is the first time we've done a Lab for this region, and I think we've got a fantastic range of companies, experiences and talents here. I've heard of a few of the teams - Hinterland, Future Platforms - but not worked with any of them before, so i'm looking forward to seeing what they come up with over the next few weeks. Here's the teams on the Labs this week, by region:

South-West - BDH & Hinterland
West Midlands - Persuaders Media & 383 Project
South-East - Panlogic, Clickwheel & Future Platforms
East England - Red Brick Pictures, Broadsight & Designer's Ink