What do Walmart, Facebook, and Lockheed Martin have in common? They all recently unveiled lavish new innovation labs. These kinds of labs go by different names — accelerators, business incubators, research hubs — and my research suggests their numbers are growing. Over half of financial services firms have started their own creative spaces, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a health care company or retailer without at least one innovation lab, whether it’s a conference room with sticky notes or a 20,000-square-foot incubator space, like the one launched by Starbucks in November of last year.
Why Innovation Labs Fail, and How to Ensure Yours Doesn’t
Setting up a research hub is easy. Setting it up to succeed is harder.
July 22, 2019
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Summary.
Innovation labs go by different names — accelerators, business incubators, R&D hubs — and research suggests their numbers are growing. They can serve as a safe space for new ideas and experiments, but one study found that the vast majority of innovation labs don’t deliver on their promise. In this article the author explains three reasons these creative centers fail: lack of alignment with the business, lack of metrics to track success, and lack of balance on the team. The author offers advice on how companies can prevent these problems in their innovation labs.