BBC News Labs: An incubator for news innovation

Joanne Kuai

22, February 2019 | London

The economics of attention in a many-to-many commu

nication environment has posted a serious challenge to public broadcaster BBC. Innovation is the key to assemble and retain engaged audiences without sacrificing their public service values, says David Caswell, the product lead at BBC Design & Engineering at BBC News Lab.

The BBC’s News Labs were founded in 2012 as an innovation incubator charged with driving innovation for BBC News. News Labs sits at the middle of editorial, research & development, and product & systems at the BBC.

The labs’ executive product manager introduced some of their approaches in innovation:

• Theatrical – spark innovation by acting innovatively;
• Imitation – observe what works, then do that;
• Optimisation – Get a little better every day;
  • Lottery – Try lots of things and hope for a winner;
• Strategic – Deliberate steps from first principles.

Mr Caswell adds that they only do prototypes, no products at the News Lab and the works are divided into three categories, including “teams”, which has to fit in a fixed project cycle, “work packages”, which are contracted externally, and “streams” – some permanent programs that keep on running.

For example, within “streams”, there are language tech, bots, events & outreach, infrastructure, and many more. And the person who leads the bots will also be in the team that handles Indian election project which is related to bots but runs in a limited time cycle.

Mr Caswell was speaking at the Product Development and Design Thinking Summit, which took place in London 21-22 February 2019. As part of the 9th Data & AI for Media Week, the event aims to inspire participants to imagine how to earn revenue with AI-driven products for their own media companies.

The Data & AI for Media Week was created by World Newsmedia Network in 2013. Since then, the conference has been held in London five times, Hong Kong once and twice in New York. The 10th Data & AI for Media Week is planned for San Francisco and Silicon Valley for 29 April to 3 May 2019.  https://sanfrancisco.dataaimedia.org/