BBC’s Innovation Lab

Got invited by Paul (the founder of yellowikis) to the BBC innovation labs today in Brighton – was so happy to see such a green and nice area of England! I must travel more now that I am in the centre of everything (a ten-minutes walk from the London Bridge rail station). No excuse anymore:

The Innovation Labs are a series of creative workshops for interdisciplinary teams of professional creative technologists, application designers, software developers and interactive media designers. We are inviting independent new media companies from across England and Scotland to pitch ideas in response to a briefs set by New Media commissioners across the BBC. Up to 10 projects in each of four regions – Scotland, N England, London and S England - will then be selected to attend a 5-day long Lab. During the Lab, they will work with BBC commissioners and other mentors to develop the idea and prepare a final pitch. On the last day of the Lab, the ideas are pitched to the BBC commissioners for further development funding.

So the idea is to have a bunch of tech-savvy folks (well I’m not as hardcore, for sure) to sit together to envision the potential of BBC’s web-based contents, and how these visions can be implemented and facilitated. It is expected the actual technologies and means should be discussed as well during the pitching sections.

I was very impressed when Matt Locke, the head of the innovation unit, showed us a prototype of the BBC 2.0 (Radio 1) of which most contents were build from syndication of technorati’s blogs, flickr‘s pictures as well as other live-feeds. Extremely sleek interface, probably adopting much of Ajax-like technologies. Love it.

But of course, that is a prototype; actual (as well as political) considerations are in place to hail up the implementation of such interface. For example,

• Corporate liabilities – stemmed from BBC’s respectability and as a public body
• Meta-filtering/Censorship – By opening up the content it may attract vandals and obscene content – so do you filter the information (risk being accused of censorship)? If so, how and who (to implement)?

I am also interested in actually teaming up to see if we can pitch on some ideas. But not sure if this is going to happen yet – will need to see how the ideas go… After all I am not a programmer at all. Still I learnt a lot today, especially on marketing and brain-storming; felt like I have been to a crash course today, such as the Stanford’s NABC:

Value propositions provide a common language for systematic, high-value innovation. SRI’s name for a value proposition’s four essential, defining ingredients is “NABC”, for Need – Approach – Benefits per costs – Competition:

• A statement of an important customer and market problem (Need)
• that proposes a way to use resources (Approach)
• to deliver superior customer features (Benefits per costs)
• when compared to others in the market (Competition or alternatives)

For our team I was kind of too over-caffeined and did not really touch on these four elements well enough, plus the atmosphere was quite reality-TV like (with a panel of ‘judges’) – but more fun. I particularly like the group on designing features for kids – not sure if the content of the meeting was supposed to be confidential – I better stop writing here!