Innovation labs are not new, but they are maturing and more and more organisations are looking to this way of working to help them stay ahead of the game and pre-empt disruption.

And unlike innovation programs that are run as a shared service within an organisation, innovation labs have the budget and authority to launch and develop their own projects autonomously. What’s more, they employ a lean startup way of working, identifying the most promising projects to work with and investing only enough funding to prove the potential for success.

To accomplish this, labs run a core innovation process, in search of opportunities where a new product meets a market need, and where technological capabilities align with consumer demand. With that, they’re able to find hidden sources of growth and opportunity and wield enormous impact at their companies—and ultimately discover new frontiers.

And as Brightidea are working with a number of organisations running funded innovation labs, it was only natural that the product would develop. At Synthesize last year, Brightidea for Innovation Labs was launched.

Built into the platform innovation labs empowers project teams to achieve three goals critical to innovation lab success:

• Work and collaborate more efficiently, adopt a lean mindset, and maintain a sharp focus
• Substantiate your projects and showcase their accomplishments to key stakeholders and executives
• Track and report on innovation impact to the business—in detail and in real time

Innovation Labs

Team Workspace

The feature we like best from this is Team Workspace. By putting organising structures and processes in place, Team Workspace greatly facilitates the collaboration, focus and discipline of innovation teams and ultimately supports them in building a holistic business model for their innovation projects.

The two parts of the tool that we really like is the Business Model Canvas feature and the Riskiest Assumption Tool. The best part about the functionality, as with all things Brightidea, you decide what elements of the tool to use within each innovation pipeline or initiative and you're not set to Business Model Canvas and we're led to believe even more functionality is coming down the line.

Read more about Business Model Canvas here and why identifying and testing riskiest assumptions is important here.