What is an innovation lab?
An innovation lab is a protected corner of a company where the normal rules do not apply. The rest of the business is organized to deliver what clients have already bought, on time and on budget. The lab is organized to find out what might be worth selling next: a new format, a new tool, a technology nobody has used in a campaign yet, a product the company could own. It may be a physical room with equipment, a small team with a budget and no client, or simply a standing commitment that some share of the year goes to work nobody commissioned.
Labs exist inside brands, where they test products, retail concepts and technology, and inside agencies and studios, where they test ways of making. The best known ones have produced famous experiments and the occasional business. The quieter ones have done something more useful: kept the people who work there curious enough to be worth hiring.
Why it matters
Why innovation labs matter
Client work is a poor place to learn. A brand paying for a launch film does not want to be the first test of an unproven camera rig, and an agency that only ever does what it has done before gets slower, safer and easier to replace. A lab moves the risk off the client's job and onto the company's own time, which is where it belongs. The first use of a new tool happens on a thing the lab made, and by the time it reaches a brief it is a capability rather than a gamble.
Labs also produce things that are not for clients at all. A tool built to solve the lab's own problem becomes software other people pay for. A format tried for fun becomes a channel with an audience. Owned products change the economics of a creative company, and they almost never come from the client calendar.
In practice
How an innovation lab works in practice
- 01
The lab needs three things: time, a budget and permission to fail. The time is usually a fixed allocation, from a day a week to a dedicated team; the budget covers the equipment, the software and the production of experiments; the permission is the hard part, because a lab that is judged by the same measures as client work will quietly turn into client work. A lead sets the questions worth exploring, often drawn from what the company keeps bumping into on real jobs, and experiments are run small and fast: build the thing, use it, show it internally, decide whether it earns another round.
- 02
The results feed back in two directions. Techniques, tools and formats that work are documented and brought into client work, with the lab's experiments as proof. Ideas that could stand alone are spun into products with their own roadmap, audience and revenue, and run as businesses rather than side projects. The lab keeps a record of what did not work too, because a failed experiment is cheaper than a failed campaign, and the point is to have made the mistake already.
At RIOT
Innovation labs at RIOT
Our lab is the set of products we have built for ourselves. Krova is production software, made by a production studio for production. AltSounds is a music video channel and Muvvoo is a music video database. vandal_ is a creative shop. Each started as a thing we wanted to exist, and each now runs as a product with its own audience, which is what happens when a lab is allowed to finish what it starts. They are also where we try new formats and tools before they reach a client brief.
Watch out
What people get wrong about innovation labs
Building the room before the remit. A lab with beanbags, a wall of screens and no question to answer produces press releases and very little else. The equipment is the least important part; the standing question of what the company should learn next is the whole thing.
The other mistake is measuring it like a department. If the lab has to justify itself quarterly in revenue, it will stop experimenting and start pitching. Judge it over years, on what it taught the company and what it built that nobody else has.
