Ideas for an Ideas Lab
I was knighted at InsureMyTrip to lead our new innovation lab. Before starting that, I pitched a quest to redo our website, which took me to another land for 18 months. But I never stopped thinking about what we were going to do with the innovation lab.
What follows are some screen captures of ideas and notes for what the lab could become. I've added some additional thoughts, these few years later, beneath the screen captures.
"Ideas to products." The input was an idea. The output was a product. When working with an idea, never forget that the goal is a product.
In graduate school I read many manifestos for art movements such as Futurism. To make significant changes in art or the corporate world, you need to make bold statements that set clear directions. I wanted to make sure that anyone working in or with the lab understood our principles.
The lab was meant to operate differently from the rest of the organization, to think differently. The lab also was meant to serve a consultant group for any other group in the organization. I took some inspiration for these dual roles for how a pure research group within a university could serve outside business groups.
Some additional statements about purpose and the work we were setting out to do. The last statement is philosophical. Philosophy is the study of fundamental problems. Every new idea has fundamental problems. You have to think deeply (the vertical), as well as outwards (the horizontal) and across time (the linear) to solve those problems.
Short version: In the early stages, ignore constraints so you don't limit what could be.
Naming something is one of the most important excercises in branding. Branding is the cumulative experience a consumer has of a business or a service. The brand for the ideas lab had to be clear and expressive. I liked "Go Ideas" best because it stated our medium, ideas, while also suggesting action. We acted on ideas to make products.
Some more branding work. Most of the above are other people's work, for inspiration. A few are my attempts at logo design. I am not a logo designer.
To think different we needed a different environment. We didn't need cubes or other office space limiters. I wanted it be raw, like a workshop, so you could change it to make it fit whatever you were doing, like MIT's Building 20.