We've wrapped up our latest concept on Affordable Warmth and are now sharing the results.

One of the questions we are often asked is how do we support things as they leave the Lab?

Innovation Labs are required to perform a variety of roles - ideation to incubator to accelerator to research & development.

One of the real challenges though is supporting things post lab. How do you make sure the business is ready to accept all the bright ideas?

The crucial bit here is getting a coalition of support ready - who share a passion for change.

This doesn't need to be huge change - in fact the chances of success are boosted by applying solutions that only require incremental changes to how the organisation works.

“Innovation is not all about new ideas; it’s about applying the right ideas in new ways to solve the problem at hand”

Labs tend to work at the edge of organisations so the challenge in mainstreaming is how you move the concept closer to the centre - without losing the best bits.

For our latest concept we've adopted an approach of:

Establishing a sponsorship team to guide the concept for its twelve weeks in the lab
Giving ownership of the concept to the team (it's not a 'Lab thing')
Asking a member of the sponsorship team to become Concept Leader - fully responsible for post Lab survival.
Work up a resource plan with the Concept Leader for scaling within the business.
Identify key business leads who will be crucial to the successful delivery and get them on board.

We'll now completed all these steps and we'll be revealing our post-Lab team over the next few days!