The Media Innovation Hub is much more than a parade of eye-catching gadgets – it’s about a range of alternative approaches to story-telling with their roots not in start up tech companies but from academia. Like Dr Claudiu-Cristian Musat’s work on ‘opinion-mining’ which automatically crawls articles (and even forums) for opinions on a subject and comes back with a comparison of pros and cons as well as a score for each subject of whether the content/audience is in favour or not.

What all of the above projects have in common is that they spring from a world of different inspirations. These don’t come from a technological approach of finding a toy and looking for a use. Nor are they from the necessarily short-term outlook of publishers mostly concerned with content and revenue for today, never mind tomorrow. Instead these projects are proof of the win-win situation that arises when we bridge the gap between academics and the publishing industry.

Past experience has taught publishers that we can’t afford to ignore the next big thing in media whether that turns out to be wearables or a social network we haven’t even heard of yet. It’s just that the daily job of creating and monetizing media means we don’t have the time or resources to spare for experimenting with the unknown. Academia however has the time, the imagination, the alternative perspective, and the funding to do just that. The trick is bringing together the worldliness of commercial media and the approach and facilities of academia so that both benefit.

That’s where the WAN-IFRA Media Innovation Hub comes in with its four key missions of sharing, connecting, facilitating, and training. In doing so it will keep the publishing community up-to-date about the latest trends while accelerating technology transfer between research centres, suppliers, and publishers.