Innovation Lab vs. Innovation Studio – What is the Difference?

Welcome to the Killer Innovation Show, the longest continuously produced podcast in history.

Each week, Phil McKinney brings you the insights and strategies to amplify your creativity

and innovation skills.

Here's your host, Phil McKinney.

This episode is sponsored by Zoom.

With Zoom, you can streamline your communication, collaboration, and creativity all in one place.

Zoom is the market-leading platform that provides video meetings, voice, webinars, and chat

across desktops, phones, tablets, and conference room systems.

To learn more about Zoom and sign up for your free account, visit KillerInnovations.com

slash Zoom.

Welcome to this week's episode.

We are shooting today.

We're shooting today's video from within the studio.

A question I got after the last series of videos that I've been talking about, the redesign

and the rebuild of my studio here in Colorado, is, is there a difference between an innovation

studio and an innovation lab?

Is there a difference?

Some people use those terms interchangeably.

In Silicon Valley, it was actually quite common.

Companies and organizations using the terms of a studio or a lab interchangeably, but

they are distinctly different.

Let me explain to you what the difference is.

So an example of a lab, some of them that are very prominent, well-known out there, is

like the Amazon Lab 126.

Lab 126 for Amazon, that's where the Kindle came from, the Echo, and a bunch of their

technologies.

There's HP Labs, an organization I worked very closely with when I was the CTO at Hewlett-Packard.

IBM Research, those are labs.

Examples of studios would be like IDEO, or Frog Design, or Red Design as another example.

So great, those are some examples, but what really is the difference between a lab and

a studio?

So let's talk about an innovation studio.

So let's talk about an innovation studio first.

It really is focused on transforming concepts into reality.

So we've talked about the FHIR framework.

We're talking about at the execution end of the project.

You've done your ideation.

You've worked out the target of what you want to try to execute on.

That's where the studio kicks in.

It serves really as the creative ally for your ideas.

Its focus is on developing and launching new products, new services with very clear

deliverables, whether that's a proof of concept or actually managing and overseeing the process

of taking your idea and getting it all the way into manufacturing.

It tends to use a design-centric approach, and very good studios that are out there will

integrate into your process.

So as you go through and you develop your ideas, you're going to be able to build your

ideas.

As you go through and you work out what it is that you want to go build, maybe you just

don't have the skill sets or you really want to bring in and really step up the game around

the design concepts or the user experience or whatever it is around your products or

services, that's where you would go do and engage with an innovation studio.

So what's an innovation lab then?

An innovation lab dives into unchartered territories.

It's sold.

Its whole mission is to create breakthroughs.

It really pays way for total industry redefinitions.

I hate the term, but an out-of-the-box thinking.

It really prides itself on being a safe space for experimenting.

It's not tied to a specific product or service.

Labs don't have specific targets of creating a product or service.

That's a studio.

That's a lab.

It's out there pushing really the far end of the boundary.

It operates really independently from the business objectives.

It's really around deep, deep, deep exploration.

Now, true labs, what I would call innovation labs, the vast, vast majority of them are

tied directly to the organization, like an HP Labs or an IBM Research.

It's tied to an industry.

There's industry labs that are out there, academic research performed at universities

and colleges around the world, or governments, like Sandia Lab or Lawrence Livermore Lab

for the federal government.

That's a lab.

Now, let's take a look and compare these.

An innovation studio really excels in design and product creation.

They can do everything from creating a product concept to delivering you a finished product.

Now, studios can range from being very, very small operations up to medium size.

They rarely become really, really large.

Think of them as an extension of your organization.

They tend to be anywhere from two people up to maybe 100 or 200 people, but they don't

become really, really large, large organizations.

Innovation labs, they excel at that experimentation and exploration.

To do that successfully, that requires meaningful dollars, tens, hundreds of million, billions

of dollars, people, and an ecosystem.

So true labs, doing the research side of it, going off and doing things like fundamental

science, like what happens at the pharmaceutical companies or companies like HP or Lawrence

Livermore Labs with Atomic Energy, et cetera, those require big, big resources, lots and

lots and lots of dollars.

So you tend to see the labs much bigger, and they're, again, tied to an organization, academic,

government, or a company.

That's what they do.

That's what they're about, industry.

So what is it I'm building?

You hear me talk about innovation studios.

Well, my day job is I run an innovation lab.

My day job is the CEO of Cable Labs.

We are an industry innovation lab for the broadband industry.

Been around 35 years.

We focus on three to eight years out.

We have about 200 people.

So that's a lab.

That is an industry lab.

It's funded by the companies that are in this industry.

They fund the lab.

The lab creates technologies, breakthroughs, working in long-range research areas that

the industry then benefits from.

Now, my personal space, where I'm standing right now, is my innovation studio.

This is my personal space.

Now it's where I work on my own ideas, my own projects.

Along with helping others bring their ideas to reality.

It's also a space where, as I am working on my own projects, I record them and I share

that with you so that you can learn how to work on your own ideas and take those ideas

and turn them into real products, real services.

So back to my day job, Cable Labs, we build no products.

We sell no services.

That is not our mission.

We are a lab studio.

You build to put it in customers' hands, to make it real.

And so this is my studio.

I'm in the process of rebuilding it.

I built it originally eight years ago.

This is where the podcast and the YouTube videos have been recording for the last decade

or so.

It's going through.

It's going through a complete redesign, re-teched out with new technologies, new capabilities.

I'm going to take you on that journey now so you can see what I'm going to do, but also

more importantly why I'm doing it and the decisions I'm making as I'm building out the

studio.

But hopefully this, today's show, answers your question on what is the difference between

an innovation studio and an innovation lab.

And they are two.

And they are distinctly different.

So think about maybe your career, if you're into innovation, do you want to work at an

innovation studio or do you want to be at an innovation lab?

And understanding both is critically, critically important.

Language is important.

And I get so frustrated with companies and organizations that think they can interchange

an innovation studio and an innovation lab.

So.

Hopefully this was helpful.

Let me know.

Pop some questions down in the comments.

Also don't forget to subscribe so that you can keep up and go along with this journey

as we completely redesign, rebuild this innovation, 1200 square foot innovation studio here in

Colorado so that you can see everything we do, all the technologies we use, all the products

and capabilities that we're planning to build into the space.

This is a journey that's going to take some time.

So stay with us, go with us.

And I look forward to your comments, your questions and your suggestions.

If there's things you think I should put into the studio, put them in the comments below.

And again, please subscribe, follow along, but we'll talk to you real soon.

Bye bye.

Podcasting nonstop since 2005.

This has been the Killer Innovation Show on the Innovators Network.

Podcasting nonstop since 2005.

This has been the Killer Innovation Show on the Innovators Network.

This show is distributed by the Innovators Network.

For more information and other great shows and content, visit theinnovators.network.

dot network.