Building laboratories, innovating the future: How journalism is catalysing its future processes, products and people through media labs

Abstract

Over the past decade, media labs have become an increasingly visible structure to create, catalyse and diffuse innovation within, and beyond, journalism. Drawing on case studies from around the globe, conducted over two years, this work-in-progress paper explores a multitude of lab structures across academia, legacy media and within independent contexts - such as accelerators and incubators. It suggests that the forms and functions of labs have the potential to create a complex picture of an industry’s innovation landscape. It outlines their activities, motivations and values to provide insights into how multiple actors within the journalism ecosystem are creating products, processes and services. Innovation labs also reveal more nuanced insights into journalism innovation. This complexity can be traced across the contextualisation of the problems they’re seeking to combat, but also how they relate to wider networks and ecosystems that they engage with, specifically the extent of the openness of their activities. To understand the manifestations of the labs: their motivations, positioning, internal and external engagement, and outputs - new products, processes, learning, skills and revenue - this paper applies multiple theoretical frames ranging from innovation diffusion, open innovation to evolutionary theory to assess and discuss the labs, their role within interlinked ecosystems that span the industry and extend beyond it.