Matt Locke has the enviable (truly!) job of being Head of Innovation for the BBC’s New Media Group. Matt presented an update on his work at Eric von Hippel’s MIT Innovation Lab conference in early September. I had chronicled a couple of these BBC projects in my new book, “Outside Innovation,” so I was pleased to have the opportunity to learn more and to get an update from Matt. With Matt’s help, I was able to turn my stream of consciousness notes into a Q&A format, spotlighting his work in outside innovation at the BBC. This story is well worth a read [download here] no matter what industry you’re in. It’s a great look into work in process as the BBC struggles to reinvent itself in an era of interactive digital media--from the outside in.
Take-Aways: Here are some of my take-aways from listening to Matt tell his story.
1. If your industry practices and business models are under fire--from disruptive technologies, shifts in customer behavior, etc.--your organization is particularly ripe for outside innovation. Everyone knows that change is coming and needed, but they’re worried and they don’t know how to predict the future. That’s a great time to harness yourselves to lead users to help chart the way.
2. As always, having the air cover of the CEO, in this case, the Director General of the BBC, is vital. But note that that support doesn’t have to mean that you get a big budget or even a lot of official backing and noise. Matt’s New Media team has been earmarked as one of the change agents for the BBC and left alone to find their own way, a small project at a time. If Matt has difficulty getting buy-in for one of his small projects, he can muster support, but he usually doesn’t need to. It’s clear that these experiments are top-sanctioned.
3. Get outside innovation going with several audiences of lead users in parallel. It’s kind of like getting plates spinning. Don’t limit yourself to a single project. Spawn multiple projects with multiple target audiences. In Matt Locke’s case, he has targeted technical developers, independent producers, consumers, and influential researchers and academics.
4. Unleash lead users’ creativity by providing tools, support, and open environments for task-focused activities. Note that each initiative needs active nurturing and support from both your change agents and by key entrenched stakeholders as well. You can see these patterns in the current projects that are described in our spotlight on BBC New Media:
* The BBC offers Backstage for techies to take BBC feeds and turn them into interesting mash up prototypes and applications. The activity within the community dropped off when two of the key drivers within BBC New Media left for other jobs. Matt has had to restaff and rekindle the energy. Every community needs an active sponsor who cares, to stimulate dialog, provide support, and cheerlead successes.
* The Innovation Labs for indie producers were successful because the BBC New Media team invested in providing the support and structure for these off-site bootcamps, and because the BBC commissioners were incented to sponsor and adopt a percentage of the new digital services that were proposed.
* The various projects that the BBC has undertaken to encourage and to leverage user-generated content—“The Action Network,” “The Time When” story-telling site, and the ongoing process of welcoming users’ photos and news tips--all have dedicated staff and journalists assigned to them. These embedded employees serve as role models for their colleagues, showing other employees how to encourage, how to build upon and leverage, and how to benefit from end users’ contributed content. Many important stories have started through local grassroots community initiatives on these user-generated content sites.
* The Collaborative Inquiry Summits for researchers and academics were successful because the BBC New Media team designed them as open collaborative engagements designed to spur cooperation between the research/academic community and the BBC practitioners, and most importantly, because the work was supported by a funding agency (The Arts and Humanities Research Council) that has both the mandate and the wherewithal to fund and sponsor ongoing collaborative research in new media, technology, and the arts. So participants knew that this was not a “one-off” workshop but the beginning of a collaborative research initiative.
5. Work out the intellectual property issues as you go. Matt Locke has developed a good working relationship with the BBC’s legal department. They have been willing to create appropriate contracts to enable lead customers to create derivative works, as well as to mutually protect the Indies’ contributions for any work that the BBC does not choose to commission. The lawyers have also been responsive and understanding when the inevitable unintended consequences occur. They react quickly and appropriately to protect the BBC brand without overreacting and shutting down the New Media initiatives.
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