BBC Innovation Labs : Day 3

Yesterday was all about making our idea "people-shaped", today it's all about making it "BBC-shaped" - looking at the BBC's core values and how our idea promotes them. I think it's summed up best by this comment from one of our mentors - "I think this is great, and someone should definitely do it - but why should that someone be the Beeb?" and that's a very good point.


The BBC's core values are driven by 5 metrics:

• Democratic
• Cultural
• Educational
• Community
• Global

Also, their New Media priorities are:

• On demand - making BBC content available anywhere, on any platform
• Navigation - They now use Autonomy for their search provider, but are always looking at new ways of searching their vast archives
• Engagement - how do they drive engagement with BBC sites

We've had good sessions and some very valuable feedback from our mentors, we can visualise most of our interfaces in our heads, and we're now starting to think about our final pitch. So when it comes to the art of pitching, there is wealth of advice available on Guy Kawasaki's blog, both on The Art Of Pitching and more general business advice.

I must confess though, the process of asking how we "embody core brand values" takes me back to the quarterly reviews at Freeserve (now Wanadoo, soon to be something else again), where we had to say how we'd embodied the brand values in the last three months, how we were going to improve our embodiment over the next three months, and provide 5 SMART objectives that we would achieve in the next three months to measure how well we were embodying the brand values.....

The trouble was that these reviews and forms were submitted to and assessed by completely non-technical staff - I remember one SMART objective of mine, not long after CFMX 6.0 came out was something like:

"I shall embody and demonstrate the core value of Working Together by providing proof-of-concept code that demonstrates the integration of ColdFusion interface code with an existing J2EE Enterprise Java Bean backend on our business-critical systems through an exposed remote API"

...and that sounds pretty impressive to a non-technical Human Resources (or "Talent Management", as they were called) person, so they happily agreed to me staking 25% of my performance bonus on the success of this proof-of-concept - and of course, one CFOBJECT tag & one CFINVOKE tag later, the concept was proven and 25% of my bonus was earned :)