±«Óãtv Research & Development is evolving a programme of Innovation Labs in a model we call the "Labs Framework" as a way of bringing people, ideas, and technology together. We believe that the new model will deliver significant benefits to our audiences and help us adapt our world-beating services for a changing and competitive world when audiences are fragmented and budgets are constrained.
This post introduces the labs, describes where this model came from, and shares some of our plans for the coming months.
For over a century the ±«Óãtv has been an innovator in both technology and content, inventing core elements of radio and television, pioneering online services, and of course creating programme formats that audiences in their millions have enjoyed.
Eight years ago, I led the team that launched ±«Óãtv Taster to be a home for new ideas for the ±«Óãtv and its partners. We have hosted over 300 projects on Taster, exploring new technologies and formats, such as the ±«Óãtv’s first augmented reality project, highly personalised experiences, and iPlayer watch parties that incorporated personal data stores.
My team also launched MakerBox, a toolkit of technology which lets people make their own innovative content experiences. It continues to be a space for experimentation where the ±«Óãtv meets our audiences.
However, the world has changed since we launched Taster, and like every other organisation in this increasingly digital world, there is an opportunity to rethink how we do things. I spent time this year researching and speaking to organisations such as and and other public service broadcasters such as and to understand how they approach innovation. Their insight helped evolve the Labs Framework.
After speaking to leaders across the ±«Óãtv, it is clear that, while everyone fully acknowledges the importance of innovation, we face real challenges in identifying, testing, and committing to the right ones.
My colleague Henry Cooke’s foresight report anticipates a vastly changed world in the next few years, which has implications for the ±«Óãtv and its role as a public service media organisation. The technologies he has been tracking are hugely transformative and there is going to be tough competition in this space as very large players with substantial resources compete for audience attention. There has never been a more important time for the ±«Óãtv to innovate.
As the outside world is getting more complex and less predictable, at the same time the ±«Óãtv has to make big choices around product direction, its technology roadmap, and its distribution strategy. So we designed a labs framework that takes account of these complexities, to ensure that work taking place in R&D can directly benefit the wider ±«Óãtv, building on our understanding of what the organisation will need in the near- and mid-future.
We want to make it really easy for ±«Óãtv teams to use R&D’s thinking and technology to solve their day to day and long-term problems, bringing value to audiences as soon as we can. It was a challenge, but we are very pleased with the reception we have had outside R&D and some early successes in channeling our innovative thinking into the wider ±«Óãtv.
What is a Lab?
A lab is a group of people who come together to work around a shared objective for an agreed amount of time, bringing together a range of people from across the ±«Óãtv including engineers, producers, researchers, designers, journalists, and others into a collaborative framework with appropriate business management and project support.
It produces design ideas, business cases, landscape reviews, prototypes and evaluations. A lab will run design workshops, audience trials and technology assessments to inform its work, all focused around a carefully developed brief.
The approach builds on the significant successes of the joint R&D and ±«Óãtv News project, , which has now been running for ten years. Initially, we will be incorporating two additional labs:
News Labs - With a revised agenda aligning R&D, News and ±«Óãtv product teams we will be focusing on live & streaming, authoring & storytelling, and trusted news.
Multilingual Lab - There is a huge opportunity to take advantage of new transcription and translation models. We are working to explore a Multilingual Lab which will meet the needs of our teams in the World Service and beyond.
Sound Lab - We have partnered with ±«Óãtv Sounds and are building out a body of work exploring audience experiences, personalised content and new ways to experience audio from the ±«Óãtv.
Underpinning the three labs, we have two crucial enablers:
The Sandbox - a portfolio of technical platforms which recreate the live product to allow for experimentation in a risk-free environment. Our first sandboxes include the News content management system, and the Sounds web and Android apps. Our colleagues around the ±«Óãtv will be able to take advantage of a safe place to trial cutting edge ideas.
Insights Lab - All the work described above will be supported and validated with a new approach to traditional research: we will be working with audiences for a longer time frame and in more considered ways to really get to know them and their needs.
What’s next?
We have a busy six months ahead of us. Over the next few weeks, we will launch our first Sandboxes and bring in new partners from around the ±«Óãtv to use them. News Labs and the Insight Lab will run research sessions in south Wales community centres exploring, amongst other things, what audiences want and need from us at live events, including elections.
And in partnership with the ±«Óãtv’s product teams, we’ll extend R&D’s work around the In Car experience, focused on commuter journeys.
We can’t wait to get started and will share our progress with you here and on the .