I haven't yet seen the new facilities at the MIT Media Lab, but I've been watching from afar as they opened their doors this week. I've had the opportunity to visit the Media Lab a couple of times over the past few years and had the privilege to work with a number of the faculty and staff of the lab, albeit briefly. To say that the Media Lab, even the old building, is an impressive place to experience is an understatement. It's like something out of the future.
What makes it so special isn't the individual talent that roams the halls day and night, it's the palpable sense of collaboration that permeates the halls. As Andrew Lippman stated in his comments to NPR about the new space, "you can stand [in the Media Lab] and literally feel the hum of what goes on". Now, I'm not sure if he really meant "literally" but with all the gear they've got you'll certainly hear something at any time of day around there. But figuratively, it's spot on.
The Lab feels alive. It hums with activity.
The Hum of Innovation (and other hums)
There's something very appealing to such vibrancy. Coffee shops have it. Airports have it. Malls have it. It's a sense of activity and vibrancy; a din of human activity that is something sensable, if not measurable. The power of the Media Lab, however is in the source of this hum, which is different from the noise of an airport.
An airport is a blend of high energy activity (catching your next flight, getting a quick bite to eat, rapidly getting unpacked and repacked during security) and low-activity energy (I'm at my gate and my plane is delayed). Through all of this, it's a cacophony of strangers. Families traveling as families and sticking to themselves. Businessmen and women traveling alone. Cleaning crews working alone. It's an extremely energetic, but highly individualistic experience. There's zero collaboration.
By contrast, the Media Lab, and all great centers of innovation, are different. They are filled with the kinetic energy of collaboration. The feeling of a collective experimentation permeates the air. It's similar to the dynamism of a start-up company or a development team about to roll into beta. It's the collegial feeling of a team helping each other reach shared goals. This is why the Media Lab has been turning out innovations left and right year after year. There are literally piles of ideas that could spawn successful companies sitting in cardboard boxes scattered all over the Lab.
How Corporate Innovators Can Learn to Hum
That's great for MIT, but what can we learn from this to help innovation in more structured corporate environments.Replicating such a lab is difficult but it's important to instilling a culture of innovation and creativity in an organization. Co-location is a huge component, and you can't really get anything close to the Media Lab's success without it. The entire space is physically designed to share information; the new building only accentuates that attribute.
Share
But in an age of increasing decentralization of corporate knowledge workers, how can you approximate co-location when you can't actually achieve it physically? Personally I think you can get a long way toward the collaborative environment simply by actively sharing information around an organization. Make sharing a core competency for product teams. I don't mean sharing findings after the product has launched, but rather sharing throughout the conceptualization, prototyping and evaluation. The simple act of passing on information that may, or may not, be of use to others is largely overlooked by teams because they are so focused on execution.
Find the Signal Together
Teams are great at getting products out the door, but this misses opportunities to explore adjacent opportunities. This is an airport model of innovation. High energy focused on individual goals. In aggregate, the hum of disparate product teams feverishly working on products doesn't sound like a hum. It sounds like noise. The real collaborative power, the innovative signal, is lost in the noise. Sharing helps turn that cacophony into the symphonic sound of an innovative organization.
Create Virtual Sight Lines
Thinking back to the Media Lab writeup linked above, Dr. Mitchell explains that the Media Lab "fosters a serendipitous exchange of ideas among the intensely cross-disciplinary researchers by making the laboratory spaces exceptionally open, with broad and often surprising sight lines from one working space to another." I like that. Sight lines.
This is what corporate innovators should be seeking to replicate, even if they don't physically sit next to one another. Share early. share often. Share everywhere. Find ways to physically and conceptually open the lines of sight between businesses and product teams. Strengthen communications. Share insights and don't be afraid to ask questions you don't have the answer to (even if people think maybe you should have them).
All of these things open lines of sight. They're also the sources of that collaborative hum, from which insights and innovations are more likely to be heard.
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