Watching Customer Innovation In Action

This week, Matt Locke of BBC New Media, (see his earlier comment  Matt Locke's Comment on Lead Users and Innovation ) and his team have been holding a Lead User Innovation Lab in Manchester, UK. Thanks to their blog, I've been watching the week unfold. The participants are teams of Lead Users from new media companies in Britain. Their goal: create new mash-ups/applications based on BBC content.

Watching this Innovation Workshop really takes me back. We ran similar workshops in the early 90's with teams of lead customers who wanted to help each other redesign their businesses from the outside in. Like Matt's Innovation Labs, the hardest part was to keep everyone focused on the END CUSTOMERS--who they were, what context they were in, what THEIR desired outcome was.. That's how our Customer Scenario Mapping method was generated.. I'll provide the history in another post on another day... We also discovered that instead of pretending to be customers, it worked best to bring end-customers into the co-design session. That really keeps you focused on their vision, while, in my experience, not constraining the creativity at all...

In Matt's workshops, teams have taken turns presenting to one another (and to a BBC commissioner)-- a technique which we also discovered worked really well to keep the energy high and to crystallize (or throw out) work in progress. Like our teams of yore, Matt's customer and BBC Innovation Labs teams have worked and played into the night, brainstorming, prototyping, and honing their presentations. And, just like Matt's our final presentations included the "pitch".. in his case.. each team provides a press release as well as their presentation.. hoping to get press coverage for their idea... In our teams' cases, since they were developing technology/business initiatives that had to be sold internally, they provided business plans and implementation plans along with their customer scenarios and prototypes...

Watching the BBC Innovation Labs in action is a great way to see customer co-design and innovation in action. Although I have only been lurking, I can attest to the fact, from my own personal experience, that the customer innovation workshop design Matt's team is using will work. They will get usable and truly innovative results.

I recommend that you check out the action...BBC Innovation Labs  The Manchester Innovation Lab is winding down this week. The Innovation Lab in London kicks off next week. What Fun!

Comments

[Patty Seybold]

Hi Frank,
Thanks for this useful background! You're right, that "the pitch" is an important crystallizer and catalyst. In our customer co-design workshops--the ones that, like yours, were multi-day affairs, we also built in several different opportunities for teams to prepare a pitch and give it. Each time, the presentations and the reactions thereto crystallized the thinking and "popped" it to the next level...

I appreciate the background information...

Patty Seybold

[Frank Boyd]

As the person who designed and directed the Lab process for the BBC, I thought you might be interested in a little background to their origin.

The Lab format has been evolving for over ten years now, starting from a series of residential workshops called the ‘European Multimedia Labs’ on a farm in the south-east of England. These events, which involved teams from small creative companies, artists, writers, musicians and coders were lightly structured. We brought in expert 'mentors' and facilitators to work with the projects, encouraged peer-to-peer support and helped people develop a pitch which they presented to visitors from broadcasters, publishers and potential investors on the final day of the Lab. In these early days there was very little explicit focus on the user.

I was subsequently invited to adapt the Lab model for the BBC who wanted to develop ideas for interactive television. The first of these, in 1999, included people and proposals that became the first live services on digital satellite: Wimbledon Interactive and Walking with Beasts. It was at this stage, working with the BBC's internal audience research teams that we began to introduce user focused techniques.

The labs were focused around pitching as a design tool (based on E.M.Forster's dictum: 'How do I know what I think until I see what I say'. We now began to ask teams to present a pitch entirely from the point of view of their target user or audience. For a lot of TV producers, this was a pretty radical idea.

I worked on Labs for five years at the BBC and became part of a team looking at how to improve the organisations approach to innovation and creative development. As part of that research we visited a number of places in the UK and the US which seemed to do development well. Two of these, SRI and Ideo, had a significant impact on the design of the Lab process.

The Stanford Research Institute confirmed that pitching was an key tool in the innovation process and taught a very valuable structure based around Needs, Approach, Benefits and Competition. Ideo gave us a lot of ideas about how to put users at the heart of a creative process.

I left the BBC over two years ago but when they announced that they were looking for ways of working with external small companies to come up with innovative new media applications and services, I went and pitched the idea of Labs to Ashley Highfield. That meeting lead to discussions with Matt Locke (a visitor at the original labs on the farm) who then commissioned the pilot series which finished yesterday.

We now have a very tight structure which produces results. These Labs have proved a very effective way of enabling the BBC and potential suppliers to understand each other, to explore approaches to innovation and to build early stage prototypes of new services.

It's a model which could be applied in many other contexts.