Chapter 6: Media Labs: Catalyzing Experimental, Structural, Learning, and Process Innovation

Labs are meant for the creation of new products and services or to overcome innovation challenges (Carstensen & Bason, 2012). Media labs, besides the name, go beyond the media industry concepts to respond to technology, communication, and economic changes (Bisso Nunes & Mills, 2021). For that, they integrate public spaces, media, arts, and tech. In short, media labs are organizational structures that allow for experimentation and development, and facilitate open innovation and individual and organizational learning. Many media labs are focused on accelerating media involvement in functional and experimental innovations and rise in a context unrelated to the temporality of media content production, on a systematic innovation approach. But media labs also represent great diversity. In this chapter, we explore key elements of the media lab phenomenon: history, definition, evolution and appearance globally and in Latin America, emergence beyond the media industry, and, by the end, final thoughts about media labs' roles amid future organizational and technological transformations.