BBC Innovation Labs, Part 3

By Nick on 31 Jan 08

Categories: bbc, innovationlabs, clients, creative, rocket

Earlier posts: Part 1 | Part 2

All our good intentions of sending in entries early have sadly, due to the inevitable everyday pressures of work, gone out of the window.

Today was the closing date for applications, and although the bulk of the proposals were written weeks ago, this morning we frantically put the final touches to our proposals, trying to tweak the entire contents of our brains into 400 words. We'd could easily have written many times that, to convey the full splendour of our concepts!

In the end we have submitted three ideas, one of which is right on brief and would be really interesting to do, one slightly off-brief but also a really nice idea (which we have all said is one we would use if it existed) and one which is a bit more of a random wild card. There were a couple of ideas which we really liked, but after writing them up really didn't fit any of the briefs. This is an example of how the creative process sometimes works – initially they came about as a reaction to the intro day and briefs, but as they progressed they had diverged so much they were no longer appropriate. Perhaps we'll keep them back for another time!

One of the hardest thing about this has been being pitched up against the mighty size, power and intellect of the BBC, and trying to squeeze out an original idea. Reading some of the BBC blogs makes you realise how many wild, innovative and exciting ideas are already being tried there. Some of the ideas we came up with, following a bit of research, turned out to have been done or trialled by the Beeb already. Others we considered were so obvious it would be inconceivable that the BBC would not have investigated them already, and consider them original enough to commission like this.

It has been a massive challenge to not let our technical knowledge strangle ideas at birth. We are very used to presenting ideas which are technically feasible within client budgets, rather than going completely crazy. I think the biggest threat to our success in this contest will be our ideas are too realistic, and just aren't innovative enough.

So now we will cross our fingers and wait. Whether we are successful or not, I hope we get some kind of feedback, if only so we know where we improve our proposals for the future.

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