What is this DREAMATORIUM you speak of?
A place to connect, tinker, and dream big, with innovation as a consequence.
Corporate innovation is in trouble. For the past couple of years, in many instances, it has been taken out of the hands of the people on the front-line and centralised with a specialist team who aspire to put it on display in corporate innovation labs, constantly saying how great they were, and never ever innovating again.
First, some definitions…
All views are my own!
Typical Corporate Innovation Lab: A brightly lit room showcasing the latest and most expensive technology money can buy, for the purpose of looking innovative. Only the cleaners are allowed to touch the tech, to wipe the dust from it. Tinkering is forbidden.
DREAMATORIUM: A dimly lit messy room with a running VR kit in one corner and a 3D printer humming away in another. A place where people talk about their passion projects, host workshops on the latest tech and discuss the future from a hobbyist point of view. Tinkering always ensues and is encouraged.
Think about the lowly 3D printer and VR headset your employer bought when the hype started, they’re likely on display somewhere, never actually used, you haven’t even got filament for the printer. It’s lonely and sad in there.
It’s the same for many companies, innovation is for show.
I’ve had a 3D printer at home for about two years now, and I use it at least three times a week. I’ve got a lab full of electronics as well, which I constantly tinker around with. Many of my colleagues have the same, and we’re all tinkerers. We’ve all got our little hobbies on the side. We’re extremely curious about new technology and new experiences we can create from it.
We just needed a place to showcase our passions.
Enter the DREAMATORIUM…
The DREAMATORIUM is a portal into the creative outlets of my colleagues, that exists in the work environment, in the hope of spurring curiosity and directing energy into the creation of value for people and our business.
Every two weeks, in a small space that breaks out into the kitchen area, on a nondescript floor in a Sydney office tower, we meet. Each session is about 2 hours long and takes place after 5pm. The presenters are deeply passionate about a particular topic, the audience intensely curious. We inspire the masses.
No-one is asking for NPV or KPI’s, or how we intend to make money from our investments (in this case, only our personal time and money)
The DREAMATORIUM facilitates raw exploration, and as a consequence, spurs ideas to commercialise, not the other way around.
The first five sessions went as follows:
- WTF is 3D Printing and how do I get amongst
- Animation & Illustration in VR
- WTF is IOT
- Designing & Prototyping for Voice
- Product Design: How to build things you can touch
We’ve had so much interest in the DREAMATORIUM that we have sessions lined up until March 2019. The audience is always huge and potential presenters are coming out of the wood-work all the time. Every week I have someone come up to me, tell me about their passion, and ask if they can run a DREAMATORIUM workshop, it brings a tear to my eye, and excites our rather large Design Studio team.
Some of the upcoming sessions include:
- The antidote to fast fashion
- Mind full or Mindful?
- Brain Waves (EEG Devices)
- Tea Time meets Happy Hour
- Back to the Future of Storytelling
- Machine Learning and Development
- Visual Content Creation 101 (wearehypothetical.xyz)
- Work-Work-Work-Life Balance
- Sharks, Laser Beams, and Photonics Degrees
As you can probably tell from the above topics, we’ve got a lot of insanely smart people in our office! I reckon every office in the world has these people, they just don’t have a reason to bring their passions into the office, more often than not, they’re suppressed by the KPI’s and metrics in place to ‘make them perform’.
One of the big things to note about our DREAMATORIUM: all of the equipment we use is either bought directly from our Experience Design team budget or self-funded / personally owned. It’s become too hard to get tech from our internal innovation team, especially if all we want to do is tinker.
Every single DREAMATORIUM that we’ve run so far has had a direct client outcome. So our tinkering pays off.
“I want one”
…is what most people say when I start talking about the DREAMATORIUM, and who wouldn’t want something like that. I guess there are some guidelines I should mention that keep the DREAMATORIUM dream alive.
Now, some guidelines…
- Tinkering with the shiniest newest toys is encouraged.
- Don’t ask about ROI or NPV or KPI’s; you’ll get kicked out!
- You need the following roles (they can be one person or many): The Maker, the Curator, the Connector, the Dreamer, the Promoter, the Motivator, the Energy Creator, and the Defiant one. These people should have enough time during the week to dedicate to their roles.
- Avoid centralisation. As with all good things in corporate-land, when it get’s lucrative, the core will try to absorb it. You must resist this with all your might. Stay nimble, stay agile, stay unowned and unofficial.
- It’s not a lecture. You need a proper workshop structure that will keep people on the edge of their seats, that inspires them, and gets them experimenting. Think: telling, showing, doing, tinkering.
There are more, but those are the core guidelines.
As far as I’m concerned, The DREAMATORIUM is where innovation is born and thrives, and the typical corporate innovation lab is where it is smothered and silenced.
PLEASE NOTE: I’m very aware that there are great examples of awesome Corporate Innovation Labs around the world, and I apologise to the best ones, but these usually include features like open innovation and hackathons that invite people to tinker, rather than restrict it.
