At InnovationLabs we’re experts in the design and operation of Innovation Labs. (That’s hardly surprising, given our name.) So we’re often asked to explain what an innovation lab is, why it matters, how it’s run, and how it’s different from a meeting room. Here’s what we tell people …
… An innovation lab consists of two parts, a physical facility, and a way of leading and managing innovation projects. Sometimes it’s both, although some organizations use the process without a dedicated facility.
Innovation Process:
It’s important to have a clear and coherent framework to manage your innovation effort whether you have a dedicated lab or not. Over the last decade we’ve developed the Innovation Master Plan, which has proven to work really well for all kinds of organizations all over the world. It’s being used by for-profit and non-profit organizations, and very successfully applied to solve all kinds of innovation challenges and problems. (If you’re primarily interested in this aspect, please download The Agile Innovation Master Plan book.)
Innovation Lab Facilities:
The larger and more ambitious the innovation effort, the more likely it is to benefit from a dedicated facility that optimally designed for innovating. Here’s how we think about it: There’s probably a conference room in your office, and you’ve probably spent many hours there. And it’s probably very similar to conference rooms you’ve sat in at other companies, a rectangular room, with a longish table surrounded by chairs.
The physical environment has tremendous influence on our behavior and our work productivity, yet it’s an unspoken assumption that meeting rooms have to fit this traditional shape, size, and layout, which reminds us that hidden influences and tacit behavior patterns are prevalent in organizations just as they are in customer groups.
Unfortunately, the architecture profession and office furniture manufacturers have standardized on this utterly drab and uninspiring concept of what “the meeting room” should be.
The style is derived from the corporate board room, and the single chair for the chairman at the head of the table conveys its primary social purpose, reinforcing hierarchical authority. Need I mention that this isn’t a very good environment for innovation or creativity? Yet in most organizations, that’s all there is.
Fortunately, there’s now a new type of work environment that’s becoming more common, a great space designed specifically to support innovative and creative work.
It is sometimes called an “innovation center” or an “innovation lab,” and it’s a place where people bring their ideas and come up with new ones, where they work to understand complex systems and create innovative solutions to problems that impact their customers and their companies and their communities. It’s a sand box for grownups, where people work together to create products and services that will become the future of their enterprises.
What’s in it?
It probably contains lots of giant white boards, large vertical work surfaces that make it easy to collaborate. The furniture is on wheels, making it easy to reconfigure the space to accommodate many small teams that are working at the same time, or one large one, or a conference or a workshop. Light, colors, and décor are relaxing and inspirational to engage the brain and promote creativity.
At InnovationLabs we’ve been designing these facilities for many years, and we’ve found them to be an essential element in a rigorous innovation system. Innovation Labs can compress weeks or even months of work into a matter of days.
A cool project we did recently gave us the opportunity to bring these concepts together to help a client conceive of its new R&D lab. In a collaborative workshop involving 350 people, the entire research department, we divided the participants into teams of 7 people and asked each team to identify the key attributes of their ideal lab. Each team then built a model of their ideal lab using craft supplies that you’d find in a typical art supply store. (The photo at the top of this post was taken during that workshop.)
We then studied all 50 models and synthesized the key ideas into a single design to help them think about what would be ideal as they continued to refine their visions of how and where they would work. It will be no surprise to you that what they came up with was definitely not a bunch of traditional and boring lab spaces, offices, or conference rooms.
Instead, they developed a visually rich, multi-textured environment for individual, team, and organizational creativity, a place where assuring optimal productivity in each setting was the central organizing theme.
Tom Allen and Gunter Henn address this issue in their lively book, The Organization and Architecture of Innovation: Managing the Flow of Technology. “Most managers will likely acknowledge the critical role played by organizational structure in the innovation process, but few understand that physical space is equally important. It has tremendous influence on how and where communication takes place, on the quality of that communication, and on the movements – and hence, all interactions – of people within an organization. In fact, some of the most prevalent design elements of buildings nearly shut down the opportunities for the organizations that work within their walls to thrive and innovate. Hence, the implications of physical space for the innovation process are profound.”
What We’ve Learned from the Best R&D Labs
Imagine what it would have been like to work in the coolest labs where amazing stuff was being invented – Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park lab where the light bulb was perfected, or Ford’s workshop where he created the Model T, or the Wright Brothers’ airplane workshop, or Douglas Aircraft when the first DC-3 was built, or at Xerox PARC when the PC was being invented. You’d be surrounded by lots of brilliant, creative people solving difficult problems with astonishing levels of insight and inventiveness. You’d be having rich and provocative conversations, making sketches and designing and making models, arguing, laughing, and building, testing, learning with great enthusiasm and dedication.
And if you’re going to provide today’s innovators with that sort of work environment to help them succeed in today’s challenging world, this is exactly the kind of place you’ll create.
To explore the details and features you might include, a few years ago we conducted a study of some of the best biotech, high tech, and pharmaceutical R&D labs around the US to find out how they’re being designed and used, and the findings are still very pertinent. In a typical lab you’ll find scientists, engineers, and technicians preparing and conducting experiments, the purpose of which are to create useful new knowledge. It may be knowledge of the uncharted physical world of chemistry or biology, or knowledge about the behavior of man-made products, or knowledge about how people interact with each other and with physical artifacts.
From the architect’s perspective, designing a research lab is not a simple problem. Since optimizing interaction is central to R&D success, facilities should maximize person to person interaction, but at the same time private space for thinking, writing, and researching in peace and quiet is also essential. Figuring out the right space layouts to balance interaction and privacy gets tricky, and cost considerations complicate the matter further because separating lab and office functions reduces construction costs but may compromise the goal of enhancing collaboration.
In the labs we visited, designers had used 90 different specific design features to optimize interaction, thinking, and creative outputs. They converged into four major theme areas:
- Organize for interaction
28 different organizational strategies and features intended to promote high quality interactions between people. - Design for interaction
54 features designed into the facilities to increase the frequency of person-to-person interaction, as well as its quality. - Design for flexibility
8 design strategies intended to enhance the flexibility of a building so that over time it would be easier to adapt it to changing requirements. - Design for beauty
A persistent theme of importance to architects and building users alike. Everywhere we looked, we saw examples of the continuing quest to make buildings beautiful, uncountable in number but pervasive in influence.
This is all written up in our white paper entitled Social Design.
Download your copy here.
Click here to go to the page where you can
download information on our designs for Innovation Labs.
(All the photos and drawings shown here are from recent projects.)
Upcoming Keynote Speeches:
Langdon will be giving keynote speeches at these upcoming events. Please join us!
INCOSE: International Council on Systems Engineering,
July 11, 2018, Washington DC.
https://www.incose.org/symp2018/home
Emerging Innovation Summit 2018: Melbourne, Australia,
October 3 – 5, 2018.
http://eis18.org/index.html
Our Latest Book:
Our latest book, The Big Shift, is due out in a couple weeks.
We’ll let you know when it’s available.
