We’d love to hear what you think about these designs for a new marketing pack.

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Footsie, our idea to help businesses reduce their carbon footprint, has been shortlisted for the Social Innovation Camp in December.

Please vote for it! Your votes will send it to the camp, where we’ll be able to spend a weekend knocking the idea into shape and working out where to take it next.

And where would that be? Maybe Unltd? Our plan is to get seed funding to work up the idea into a business plan and pitch. Then we’d start approaching businesses who might be interested in sponsoring the project. With four businesses involved, we’d have a set of beta testers and enough money to build the site.

But first we need your votes…

We’ve been talking to a couple of climate change organisations recently, and it’s inspired us to start thinking about how online environments can help individuals and organisations adapt.

What’s the goal here — to raise awareness? No — everyone knows we’re in an eighteen-wheeler heading for the cliff. We know this. We’re just too paralysed to steer. (For anyone who wants to understand how we got to this point, and how much worse the situation is than they realise, watch this gripping video). (more…)

Update: we were shortlisted for Social Innovation Camp.

Footsie will help larger businesses develop a carbon-reduction strategy through a game experience of pledges and prediction markets.

It’s a collaborative tool which will engage all staff in planning, implementing, monitoring and evaluating change strategies – all with a few minutes of engagement a week. (more…)

I’ve been talking about the BBC Innovation Lab for several days now, and I realised I still haven’t properly explained how it works. So now I will.

The first stage is soliciting applications in a short, structured, text-only format. No fancy visuals, no investment in eye-candy, no false promises.

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At the end of Part 2, I asked a question which I failed to answer. "Could these self-conscious innovation processes ever take hold in the television world?" To address it we need to know a little more about the people involved in the Lab. (more…)

The second way in which the Innovation Labs were a good thing (see Part 1 was that they were a self-conscious attempt at a better creative process. Ever started a new job and wondered – why the hell do they do things like this? It’s crazy! You can see so many ways to improve processes. And then the outrage starts to fade as you get on with the job, and six weeks in you’re just like everybody else.

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At the end of March 2007, I was invited to the BBC Innovation Lab. The basic idea behind the Lab is to give independent producers the chance to pitch their experimental new media ideas to BBC Commissioners. More than that, though, it’s a workshop in user-centred design which has tried to set best practices for developing innovative ideas.

I think it’s a very exciting development for a number of reasons. Firstly, it tells us how the BBC sees itself. It used to be a broadcaster – radio, then TV. Forty years later the Web came along, and the Corporation kept quiet while its worker bees found interesting ways to apply it to their programmes. And when it was finally challenged, the BBC said something like, “Yes, we’re making websites. They’re for our TV programmes. It’s like leaflets. We’ve been doing leaflets for years. Nothing to worry about.”

But things are different now. Everybody knows websites aren’t like leaflets any more. And what the BBC is doing, quietly, but clearly, is saying – we’re not a broadcaster any more. We are a medium and a means – and we aim to weave the media fabric of this society.

Here’s an example: children on a school trip, heading to Whipsnade Zoo. They pile out and head to the bear enclosure. Grabbing their phones, they photograph a barcode next to the enclosure, and the next moment they see David Attenborough talking about the bears, and see the bears in the wild, on their phones.

Is this what a public service media agency in the 21C should be doing? Absolutely. Is it broadcasting? Clearly not. It’s something else, and that something else could be almost anything. And so how do you find those other things you don’t know you want? You start an Innovation Lab.

We successfully pitched to attend the BBC Innovation Lab in 2007, and it was a great experience. I wrote a few posts about it back then, and in the light of 4IP they seemed worth posting again. They’ll appear over the next few days.

Channel 4 have just opened their eagerly-awaited 4IP fund. It’s an important moment.

Why? Firstly, it’s a big pot of cash (although smaller than we hoped). It’s a new funding model for C4, where, instead of commissioning projects, it supports them with equity investment. It reaches out to everyone, not just an elite of programme makers. And finally, it’s asking for completely new kinds of ideas, the kind that it’s hard even to associate with a television channel.

Matt Locke

My first inkling of the fund was when I spoke to Matt Locke soon after he had joined Channel 4. He had been appointed to the Education Dept, which was frustrated that it had been making good programmes for teenagers which they didn’t watch. Matt explained that they were abandoning TV and putting the whole budget into online.

— The whole lot? I said.
— Yes, he said. We’ve got six million pounds.

This seemed extraordinarily bold. I quickly started to think how we could help him spend it.

— So you’d like ideas?
— Lots of them, he said.
— For the website?

He looked disparaging.

— We want to go where people are, he said. Facebook, IM, text. We want to engage them. We want to touch their lives.
— With a nice Channel 4 logo? I said, helpfully.
— No, he said. Not Channel 4 branded. Under the radar. Cultural interventions.

This blew my mind. Channel 4 is an institution which brands everything it touches. Only The Guardian has been greedier in annexing our culture to its brand. And now it was going anonymous? With “cultural interventions”? Not programmes? Not informational websites? Not even ‘360 programming’?

Here was a channel which had been founded to explore minority interests and experimental television, and had ended up twenty years later sticking a C4 logo on Desperate Housewives. Channel 4′s journey has been a strange one, and in some ways a story of the times. This was a real twist in the tale.

Tornados and Power-ups

Matt gave examples of the kind of projects he admired, like World Without Oil. I started to understand what he meant. WWO was an online game which simulated the beginnings of a global oil crisis. Americans playing the game visited the website to see video reports of the crisis developing, and then reported back on how it was affecting their lives. It was a consensual hallucination.

Over 1900 people signed up as players of World Without Oil, and submitted over 1500 stories from inside the “global oil crisis of 2007.” Their work comprises a rich, complex, and eerily plausible collective imagining of such an event, complete with practical courses of action to help prevent such an event from actually happening.

What a great idea! And it offers its own possible future, one where we use simulation to understand the complexity of the world, where we learn through engagement, where storytelling and action allow us to feel problems as well as understand them.

For these people and over 60,000 active observers, the process of collectively imagining and collaboratively chronicling the oil shock brought strong insight about oil dependency and energy policy. More than mere “raising awareness,” WWO made the issues real, and this in turn led to real engagement and real change in people’s lives.

This was what Matt wanted. I wanted it too — certainly more than I wanted Desperate Housewives. It felt like Channel 4 was returning to its original values, and yet taking a direction which could see its original role entirely disappear.

Public service publishing

And now we have 4IP, which from where I’m standing, is this vision given weight. The Education and New Media Dept have kicked off some very interesting projects in the past twelve months, but 4IP is a national statement.

The question is — will it stick? Or will it be like Dragon’s Den, where a few ideas get a wave of the wad, and even those get mired in due diligence and funding hassles. Our first contact with Matt was through the BBC Innovation Lab, a thoroughly exciting initiative in the same mould as 4IP. But for many of us, the promise outstripped the reality as our projects became stranded in development hell. It’s really hard to nurture ideas, and if the executive and marketing-led interference which has characterised C4′s approach to TV development is placed on Tom Loosemore at 4IP, then I suspect he’ll soon be moving on.

I really hope not, and I really hope the fund flourishes and scatters “power-ups” and “tornados” (Matt’s words) across our cultural landscape. But to be frank, I don’t think Channel 4 has the guts to follow it through. The organisation is under pressure — ad budgets are dramatically shrinking — and when it’s under pressure an organisation resorts to old habits. So expect to see pressure on the fund for big hits, for brand awareness, for reach among its target demographics. And when that happens, Tom and Matt will walk, as they walked from the BBC before.

To be continued

Would that be an unhappy ending? For Channel 4, yes. Because it will have lost a rare opportunity to reinvent itself into a unique 21C cultural institution. Creating a genuinely supportive culture of innovation is hard, and to succeed it needs to run through an organisation like letters through rock. The innovators have been brought in, but I think this vision is their vision, and it’s for Channel 4 to do the hard thing and make it theirs too.