Walking the talk: increasing innovation in the media sector

Professor David Edgerton, Imperial College London

One of the great problems in thinking about innovation is that we do it in such un-innovative ways. We tend to share a view as to where the future is going, where, we are and where we have been. Those views are authoritative – they are set out by the most respected authorities. We need new ways of thinking about the past, present and future of innovation, ones in which uncertainty is as central as it is in the real world of innovation. We need to emphasise the very great uncertainties in our knowledge of innovation, and be open to new ideas. For example, it may be that we are not living in an innovative age. The problem may not be coping with innovation, but generating it.

Dr Norman Lewis, Wireless Grids Corporation

Whenever we start talking about innovation, we focus upon outcomes and solutions. What we fail to discuss is the far less glamorous challenge of how the problems underlying these innovations were identified, and thus, were eventually solved. Defining the right problem is the single most difficult and elusive quest in innovation. It takes research, application, perspiration, time and dedication. In today’s short-term, risk-averse business culture, which insists upon predictable outcomes and rates of return on investment in R&D, innovation has become a cultural affectation and an advertising gimmick. If the media industry really wants to innovate, it needs to identify what problems need solving – technically and socially. The industry needs to focus upon the disruptions ahead and how to take advantage of them. It needs to examine how media consumption has changed, particularly how younger people adopt and use the media as both a means of self-expression and a way of creating social networks of meaning.

Dominic Collier, LBi International

Innovation is naturally risky. To be innovative, commercial organisations need to calculate and plan to mitigate those risks. In some industries – for instance FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) – innovation through perpetual product development is an integral part of the business model. The time and cost of necessary research, the risk of failure and the value of success are all calculated. In the media industries this does not apply. Both the technologies that generate and deliver media products and services, and the audiences that consume them (and increasingly also generate and deliver them) are evolving too fast for the next successful format or behaviour to be easily predicted. Ask any planner. ‘Proper’ audience and market research into novel content takes time and money, and does not offer any guarantee of accuracy or success in a fast-moving market. Emerging technologies are, almost by definition, unproven until they succeed. And it is largely in the realm of digital technology and the audience’s use of it that innovation lies. The problems to be solved for media organisations wishing to innovate are ultimately related to time and money. How can media companies secure investment from profit-focused shareholders to take risks with technology and content without any guarantee, or even an acceptable chance, of success as measured by traditional return on investment? How can they innovate at the speed of the audiences they seek to serve? And what future is there for media companies that are not also technology companies?

Frank Boyd, Unexpected Media

The current rows about trust in television, fakery, noddies and the naming of kittens are one symptom of the passing of analogue, broadcast media. Audiences and users are adapting to opportunities opened up by digital tools for production, distribution and consumption at a pace which professionals, the controllers, the commissioners and the producers struggle to match. It’s not just that audiences are fragmented, able to time-shift, use a bewildering array of devices and expect to participate and to create as well as consume. People have become much more sophisticated in their ability to read time-based media. They are capable of traversing and blurring borders between personal and public, and between fiction and reality, in ways which challenge the established grammar of television and linear media. Innovation in a mediascape in which nothing remains constant demands a new sensibility, new interdisciplinary modes of development and production, and a new relationship and engagement with users as co-creators, not just consumers.

Rachel Jones, Instrata Limited

The media sector has begun to look at people’s experience of content beyond consumption, and has realised that anticipating content and reflecting on content are part of that experience. But with content not necessarily consumed at the time it is broadcast, nor on a television set in the living room, experiences are becoming more fragmented and more complex. We need to take a new look at how people are engaging with content – both in terms of their modes of engagement and the way we can foster communities – to spark more radical innovation in the media sector.

• How might we define innovation in the media sector? Does it have a different character from innovation in other sectors?
• How can we measure innovation in the media sector? Are metrics from other industries appropriate or, as has been argued with the creative industries, do traditional models for measuring innovation fail to capture its scope? Should metrics focus explicitly on value created?
• What are the barriers to innovation in the media industry today?
• What have been the breakthrough innovations in the media industry over the last century? Where did they come from, which innovation models underlay them, and how were they perceived at the time?
• Are the models of innovation that underlay these breakthroughs still as effective? If not what has changed and what new models have evolved and need to be created?
• Do innovation models overly emphasise particular factors or inputs (technology, user acceptance, business case), and how well are different models balanced, across organisations and across the industry?
• Where is best practice in evidence?