The fourth session I attended on the morning of BeeBCamp was done by Tristan Ferne from Audio & Music Interactive (A&Mi). He heads up a development team who does research and innovation type stuff around the BBC’s radio platforms. Yes, it’s probably one of the coolest jobs in the world.

It came out almost immediately that the BBC is obviously in a unique position. Although we can innovate and have a lot of content to work with, we also have some negatives:

  • We’re not as agile as start ups
  • We’re responsible to our community, which pays the license fee
  • We can’t compete with start ups in terms of focus
  • We always have to keep editorial judgments and public broadcast responsibility in mind

This led us to discuss how the BBC can differentiate ourselves from other software developers:

  • The BBC is in a unique position, and we don’t have to compete with start ups
  • We are community led, which also means we should make use of our audience and innovate in partnership with them
  • There still needs to be a lot of cultural change in the organisation

A lot of interesting ideas came out of this session, and Rain had some of the best. My notes were a bit sparse as I got excited about all the cool ideas:

  • Rain was really interested in virtual worlds and getting BBC people to use them for work. With a lot of FM&T people moving to Salford soon, she suggested it would be a better way of interacting
  • Another adjunct to this was marrying the real world with virtual, using RFID tags. Wouldn’t it be great to have a virtual Media Village, and you could do a quick “Google search” to see where a colleague was? (Yes, this did raise the privacy issue)
  • This also led  to a discussion on how technology is shaping learning, and how we can use technology to better train people at the BBC (subtle reminders to the gaming session of earlier)
  • I suggested the opposite marriage of virtual and real worlds: using a device to give me information about the world around me. I blogged the semantic life idea last year, and there was also a similar product at TC50 called Tonchidot which did this with the iPhone

Obviously the current financial crisis is hurting tech companies, and this is all the more reason for the BBC to take up the slack in research and innovation. Perhaps we should look at all the great ideas from places like the TechCrunch Deadpool? If someone is in there, they had a great idea but for some reason it didn’t work out. As the BBC we have the opportunity (and in some cases the responsibility) to try out these ideas for the public good.