Media labs: Constructing journalism laboratories, innovating the future: How journalism is catalysing its future processes, products and people

Abstract

Over the past decade, media labs have become an increasingly visible structure to create, catalyse and diffuse innovation within, and beyond, journalism. In this article, we offer insights into the multiple forms media labs can take, and how innovation in the media field is being organised through labs. As such, we focus on innovation processes and practices rather than innovative outcomes. Drawing on 45 semi-structured interviews with media labs around the globe, conducted between 2016 and 2018, this exploratory study explores the multifaceted nature of the media lab concept across academia, legacy media and independent structures. To help better understand the many different manifestations of the media lab construct encountered in our study, this article adopts a purposefully interdisciplinary approach spanning open innovation, institutional and social theories to illuminate and sense-make the global lab phenomena. First, we unpack the media lab construct by detailing the where, what and how of the media labs surveyed in this study. We then suggest that the many forms and functions of labs reveal a complex and nuanced picture of an innovation landscape. We trace this across the ways in which media labs perceive their own roles, and how they relate to wider networks and ecosystems that they engage with, specifically the extent of the openness of their activities. Ultimately, we suggest that media labs are in part shaped by mimetic, coercive and normative isomorphism: media labs are a replicated structure and signifier for innovation but do not exhibit absolute replication: they still retain local variation and mutation, which is influenced by localised factors or influences that are unique to them. They take myriad forms, are located across industry and academia, open, interdisciplinary and, for the main, focus on immediate innovation using user-centred innovation approaches.