BBC Innovation Lab (Part 4)

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.

The second stage is marking those applications from 1-5 on each heading, then phoning up the teams with the highest scoring applications and congratulating them.

The third stage is bringing everyone to a secret location for a week to develop their ideas. Most people are asked to bring one idea – we had two they liked, and the way the Lab was organised made it tricky for us to work on both, so we focused on one of them until we realised that we’d backed the wrong horse.

Day 1 was introductions: it was a reminder of what a rainforest ecosystem the new media world is. There were hardcore techies, documentary makers, illustrators, designers, and enough amateur musicians to form a band. Companies, collectives and temporary affiliations were all evident. After getting to know each other, we split up and started to pull our proposals apart, looking for new dimensions and gaping holes.

Day 2 was User Day. We imagined who our users were. We described them in detail: their habits, reactions, language. This was storytelling: if we could tell stories about our characters that convinced others, then maybe they were more than just lazy assumptions and buried prejudice. Then we set our users loose on our product, forcing ourselves to answer their questions – Why should I use this? What’s in it for me? How does it work? What’s the point?

Day 3 was Client Day. We focused on the needs of the BBC – what their goals were, and how our ideas could help meet them. We’d been pitching to some clear briefs, so this was a help, but now we had the commissioners here we could find out what they thought.

Day 4 was Build Day. Until today, we’d been spending a lot of time watching and commenting on other people’s pitches – this was interesting, and valuable feedback, but now we needed to get on. In our case, Day 3 had told us that our first project was never going to be suitable, so we had to abandon it and work on #2. That meant fancy graphics and animations were out – handdrawn posters were in. It was suddenly like doing an advertising pitch from the 1950s.

Day 5 was Pitch Day. We all pitched in turn to the group, including the commissioners. Everyone answered questions. We broke for lunch, and when we came back the commissioners told us what they thought and who’d got money (we did). It was over. We’d all gone through something together, and there was the satisfying conclusion of decisions being made.

I was reminded at several points during the week of Csikszentmihaly’s concept of Flow. I think creative people crave flow states, but unlike for athletes or salespeople, their environment doesn’t always support them. Here are some of the components of flow:

• Clear goals.
• Concentrating and focusing (a person engaged in the activity will have the opportunity to focus and to delve deeply into it).
• Direct and immediate feedback.
• Balance between ability level and challenge.
• A sense of personal control over the situation or activity.

Clear goals, immediate feedback, calibrated but challenging tasks, high focus – this was the bread and butter of the Innovation Lab. I know I wasn’t the only person who felt more alive that week than I had for a while. There’s a simple lesson here – give your creative people flow experiences. The experiences will stick with them, and the people will stick with you.