Instead of assembly line, think swarming beehive. Teams of people from different disciplines gather to focus on a problem. They brainstorm, tinker, and toy with different approaches — and generate answers that can be tested on customers and sped to the market. At times, it’s true, innovation labs can seem like dot-com flashbacks, full of pretentious rhetoric, black-clad engineers, and interior design clichés like cappuccino machines and foosball tables. But the fact is that the concept has been embraced by companies far removed from Silicon Valley. These organizations have discovered that innovation labs can be a powerful tool for big corporations to cut through their own bureaucratic bloat.
A central tenet of the innovation lab movement is that layout and design are crucial. Mattel Inc.’s preschool toy unit, Fisher-Price, has its center at company headquarters in East Aurora, N.Y., but it’s clearly a separate part of the operation. Called the Cave, the center boasts bean-bag chairs, comfy couches, and adjustable lighting that makes people feel as if they’re far from the office. Teams of staffers from engineering, marketing, and design meet there with child psychologists or other specialists to share ideas. After observing families at play in the field, they return to brainstorm — or “sketchstorm,” as they call it. Then they build prototypes of toys from foam, cardboard, glue, and acrylic paint.
Mingling with people from various disciplines has been key at the three-year-old operation. Staffers such as Tina Zinter-Chahin, senior vice-president for research and development, call the interaction spelunking, since it’s based on an idea of taking a “deep dive” into product development. “People at first were skeptical,” says Zinter-Chahin, noting that toy designers didn’t care to spend so much time with marketers. “They said: ‘Come on, I’m going to go away for five days and take a marketing person?’ We found that while they aren’t great with foam and glue guns, they’re great at hashing out an idea and positioning the product.”
Already, Fisher-Price staffers can point to successes. After observing babies as they learned basic skills, the spelunkers realized that moms spent a lot of time teaching kids about such things in the house as doors, light switches, drawers, and kitchen utensils. While the company could boast about toys that make noise or flash lights, it was short on real-world practical stuff. It solved the problem with Laugh and Learn Learning Home, a $65 model home made of plastic, where kids can crawl through a front door and explore the alphabet, numbers, music, speech, and different sounds. A smash hit in its 2004 debut, it’s now a full line of toys. The outfit has high hopes for a couple of forthcoming products, such as the Easy Clean high chair, the result of a spelunk about issues moms had feeding kids.
Although innovation labs are typically created to generate new product ideas, they are also sometimes used to improve manufacturing processes. At Boeing Co., (BA ) for instance, nearly 3,000 engineers and finance and program management staffers from scattered locations in the Renton (Wash.) area were moved last year to the factory where 737 jetliners are assembled. “If you are in the office area, you can feel and hear the noises in the factory and can look out your window and see the wing tips going down that line,” says Larry Loftis, director of manufacturing for the 737. “There is a constant reminder for the engineers.”
Such shifts smooth the way toward faster working arrangements. To urge people to mingle, Boeing created common break areas where mechanics and engineers can talk shop over coffee or a snack, building informal relationships that could speed both daily working processes and innovations. Now, if a mechanic finds that a part doesn’t fit, he can find an engineer to redesign it nearly on the spot. Or when a jet with a novel interior design first rolls on the line, the engineers and mechanics can make changes, as needed. “When things don’t fit exactly right, they can change the engineering or blueprint in hours, instead of weeks or months,” Loftis says.
