A Look Inside The Lab
Think about the big problems that affect your industry. What challenges are on the horizon in the next 3–5 years? What is the scary question nobody knows how to address? What unknowns keep you up at night?
For most of us (especially those of us who are more practitioners than managers), the amount of time we can devote to facing those existential problems head-on is most likely somewhere between “not enough” and “none.”
The Public Radio Incubation Lab creates a space for folks at NPR and around the public radio network to actually put our day-to-day work aside and tackle the questions that loom large in our industry’s future. Right now, the inaugural Lab team is tackling the question of how to leverage digital scale to drive value to NPR Member stations.
And while there’s a lot of geeking out about public media and its problems, one of the primary focuses of the Lab is how teams can work better together to spark transformative ideas. To that end, we’ve used design thinking methodologies and activities to research, prototype and test our concepts.
While design thinking continues to have an increasing influence at NPR (well beyond our design department or product scrum teams), the Lab is different. We’re a cross-disciplinary team (several of our members were new to design thinking altogether) that has embraced design thinking as our framework for not just the work we’re doing, but how we work together. We are committed to interlinked cycles of ideation, research and iteration for everything from our biggest ideas to the shortest morning scrum meeting.
If you’re curious about the Lab, the work we’ve been doing or our approach to getting it done, I’d invite you to follow our blog, or reach out to the team! Transparency is another key tenet of the Lab, and we are always delighted to share what we’ve learned with anyone who’s interested.
