Over the past 20 years, the “innovation lab” or “creative lab” has emerged as an important stage in the development process of many projects in the creative industries. Thousands of creative professionals have participated in these labs, hundreds of ideas have been conceived, scrutinized, pulled apart, pitched, developed, prototyped and, in many cases, commissioned.



This short survey considers the characteristics of some of these events, their methodology and outcomes. It takes as its focus a series which started in 1997 as the European Multimedia Labs and has developed over more than a decade through a number of iterations which have included the BBC's Interactive TV Labs, the Innovation Labs and the Crossover programme.