Investigation into innovation laboratories in the media

[Shishirgano9]

The global media ecosystem is going through a period of restructuring. As innovation in media and journalism becomes more and more a matter of survival, we are faced with the emergence and rebirth of media labs around the world. They live in universities (as a precursor, the MIT Media Lab) or in media groups, but can also be independent as independent initiatives not linked to a specific academic or media institution, or as a consortium between different types of organizations.

In partnership with the WAN-IFRA Global Alliance jiangsu mobile number database for Media Innovation (GAMI), my PhD thesis [1] examines the roles, challenges and outcomes of media innovation labs, primarily through quantitative research based on a 32-question survey. This is a complementary approach to the Media Innovation Mapping project, WAN-IFRA’s qualitative effort to better understand these spaces of innovation and experimentation, and to provide examples of best practices in media innovation around the world.



, WAN-IFRA

Creating a database of media labs was necessary to understand the scope of the project: we identified over 100 media innovation labs worldwide. However, the types of media labs seem to differ across regions. While North America and Europe seem to have a majority of academic and/or corporate labs, Latin America showed a growing number of independent labs. In this region, labs seem to exist mainly in universities and as independent labs, with corporate labs not being so popular.