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Lab 351: Innovation-in-a-box approach allows anyone in the company to develop their ideas and entrepreneurial skills

The Globe and Mail encourages all employees in the company to pitch as many innovative ideas as they can even if they are at the back of napkin stage.

by WAN-IFRA Staff executivenews@wan-ifra.org | October 26, 2017

Lab351 is part of Globe Labs, the Globe and Mail’s innovation hub where data science, UX, prototyping, user testing and ideation happen. Lab351 is not staffed by a dedicated team. Instead, Gordon Edall (Director Globe Labs) tries to encourage all employees to pitch their ideas.

There’s an individual track and a track for small teams to tap into the resources they need to develop their ideas and turn them into projects that make a difference. Launched in June 2015, the lab was inspired by the Communitech lab at the University of Waterloo.

The Globe and Mail recently moved into a new building where the lab has a dedicated space. Although the initial idea was to extend the lab to external innovation in the form of start-up acceleration, they have decided to stick with internal innovation for the moment:

“We haven’t eliminated it as an idea that is worth considering on a regular basis and I have conversations about what that would still look like,” says Gordon Edall, “but external innovation would have been a much bigger investment and it would have been a much more risky endeavour.”

Read the full article on media-innovation.news.

This is one of the cases collected as part of the ongoing Media Innovation Mapping project, a collaboration between WAN-IFRA’s Global Alliance for Media Innovation and the Media Innovation Studio at UCLan

Read about the 30+ Media Labs we talked to so far or contact us to share your story.

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