The benefits, challenges and opportunities of an Innovation Board at a media company
Why should you have an innovation board? And if you have one, who should be on it? What are the benefits and challenges? On the morning of January 18th, four of our Future Media Hubs members provided us with some interesting insights into how their respective innovation boards operate and what they have learned from past experiences. Let us introduce you to our panel first.
Margaret Karnaze is the Head of Technology Transfer & Partnerships for R&D at BBC, Jouni Frilander is the Innovation Lead at Yle, Heino Schaght is Innovation Manager at Mediahuis België and Dieter Boen is the head of technology strategy and innovation at VRT. Moderated by Lieke Decosemaker from Future Media Hubs, they discussed what it means to have an innovation board within an organisation
What does an Innovation Board look like?
The innovation boards at these four media companies all look a bit different but have the same goal nonetheless: to determine a general innovation strategy, allocate budgets, share information and be a sounding board for big projects.
The BBC’s innovation board is the Transformation & Innovation Steering Group (T&I SG). The group is about two years old and meets quarterly. The T&I SG consists of senior leadership and shapes the focus of R&D’s T&I activity. The group reviews R&D’s innovation agenda in depth, sets strategic priorities and assess KPIs.
At Yle, there is a difference between the core innovation team, which focuses on the overall innovative strategy, and the 15 floor-level people from different departments that make up the Yle Sandbox team. The latter meets every two weeks to listen to pitches and jointly decide which projects should be funded.
Mediahuis also has two different types of boards: the advisory and the growth board. The advisory board meets twice a year and is made up of the group CEO, group CDO, group CIO, group HR director and the innovation manager. They decide on the budget and the focus of the innovation agenda. The growth board meets up four times a year (or when needed) and decides on the challenges, priorities, budget allocation and the good balance in the portfolio of Mediahuis. The growth board also decides, linked to the overall strategy of Mediahuis, on the projects that are eventually rolled out. The CDO, product directors, platform director, change director editorial and innovation manager sit on the growth board.
In need of top-down management support, VRT started gathering an innovation board panel about a year ago. This board consists of 10 people (this includes the CTO, the CDO and a selection of managers who are influential within different parts of VRT), who meet every six weeks. At VRT, the meetings are focused on strategy and deciding on the innovation topics for the company as a whole, rather than evaluating on a project basis.
The benefits
Because the innovation board can decide on the long-term strategy, being able to lay the groundwork for the future is one of its biggest benefits. By generating excitement and enthusiasm at the top management level early on, there is a greater chance of carrying out the technology once it is matured. Because in the long run, ideas need to be developed into the content.
From a practical standpoint, there is a continuous fight to get into the timeline of strategic topics, the roadmaps. But what happens when you are not on the priority list but your idea is still innovative and beneficial in the long term? This is where the innovation board can also be useful.
The challenges
But as with every good thing, there are also challenges, and planning proves to be the biggest one. Because of the nature of the members of the board and their schedules, it is hard to get everyone at the same place at the same time. At the BBC, a lot of work is happening offline. Dieter thinks that a way to get people to free up their schedules is to focus on the inspirational aspect of the meetings.
A possible solution to these problems could be to invite external members to join the board. On one hand, adding some people in different fields of the industry could challenge the existing members from the outside and create new dynamics. But it is also a way to diversify your board members. Often, the position is tied to the role rather than the individual. Evaluating external members could ensure that the board isn’t made up of the same people for years and years. There are some concerns about how this would work practically: do we make them sign NDAs? What about the payment? And would adding extra people to the schedule make it even more difficult to get a meeting up and running?
How does an idea become a real project?
What does the actual decision-making process look like? At most companies, there are talks ahead of the innovation board meetings. This allows for the board to operate more as a validation and an overall governance system of the approved projects. In that way, the meetings also create a deeper understanding of the initiatives and how those fit within the company. In general, the focus of the innovation board lies more on the business and the impact on the consumer, than it does on the technology, which is something that can be explored once funding is in place.
However, it can be useful to invite people from technical departments to the innovation board meetings. Dieter has learned that the hype cycle and jumping on trends that are in the press, is one of the biggest threats to long-term innovation. So it is important that someone can translate these technical revolutions into strategic advice for a media company.
How does the decision-making work?
At Yle, the decision-making process is kept as simple and transparent as possible. In the biweekly meetings, a couple of teams pitch ideas to the Sandbox team. Following a Q&A session, they will determine if the innovation department wants to take a project further and fund it.
The approach of Mediahuis is a bit different: the decisions are made during the growth meeting, but the board members get the project information upfront. During the meetings, they talk about the things they agree or disagree on and which projects need to be approved. However, they often share their thoughts with Heino beforehand.
At the BBC there are also a lot of discussions that happen in anticipation of the meetings. But in the BBC’s case, the T&I SG does not discuss operational or funding issues. The board focuses on the technology and innovation priority areas and where R&D should focus effort. The conversations during the T&I SG meetings are around whether or not the portfolio of projects are appropriately balanced and include deep dive discussions around specific initiatives and how they will impact the future of the BBC.
VRT is similar to Mediahuis and BBC in the sense that the people that are important in the decision-making talk beforehand with the board being the official validation. Sometimes a discussion is brought up, but most of the time it’s already clear where the members stand before the start of the meeting. The beneficial thing about this is that you create a common understanding of the topic within the upper management that can be put into the company as a whole.
What are the possibilities?
There are a lot of future opportunities to give back to the board members. For example, they can be plugged into meetings and speak at events on their respective expertise. In that sense, they become your spokesperson on that specific topic. Margaret added that the people that are involved in the steering group at the BBC often are on these stages already. At Mediahuis, this is already being done on an internal level.
Overall, an innovation board proves to be a beneficial asset to a media company. By determining strategic priorities around the topic and potentially facilitating collaborations with businesses to effectively get a product to the consumer, you create top-down support for innovation. In the long, as well as in the short term, the benefits of having an innovation board outweigh the challenges.
