Chris Garrett — Cotswolds based web designer

This week I’ve been enjoying the stunning scenery and great company of the BBC Innovation Labs. The caliber of the competition has been incredibly high and I’ve been learning something new from every conversation and presentation. Today was the day we got to put our initial pitch to the relevant commissioners. In our case this was James Thornett, who provided us with the perfect feedback for us to go away and prepare our final pitch.

The week’s made me realise how much the creative process resembles one of growing a plant. At the beginning of the week, we were presented with an illustration similar to the one above. The illustration, in essence, represents the curve of developing an idea. You start at the beginning with an idea of what you’re going to do, Tam and I already had ours fairly refined, but when we got here we had to let it grow. The idea formed a lot of new leaves, some of which were healthy and green, others were plagued by infection and wouldn’t last very long.

The next step was the share it with people. We released our idea out into the group who provided us with feedback, but it wasn’t until we pitched to James that we released we had some heavy pruning to do. So now we have the task of cutting out the un-necesary features and refining the features the BBC wants. By doing this, we’re making the idea smaller in scale, but much stronger and more balanced.

After that it’s just a case of watering and maintaining the idea until it makes it through to completion. Then we can plant and grow a few ideas for version 2 :)