Focus on intrapreneurial innovation at media and tech companies

How can established media and tech companies foster innovation from within large organizations? That will be the focus of the upcoming Collab/Space New York workshop on July 8, 2014, sponsored by the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute and hosted by the Ford Foundation. It will be an all-day, hands-on workshop focused on “intrapreneurial” innovation and spotlighting 9 cutting-edge media projects. We will choose nine innovative projects, which will present their work to-date in lightning fashion followed by Q&A with the audience.  We’ll do collaborative exercises — using improv comedy techniques — to learn how to work better together in the digital age, and break out into groups to help these media projects get past their challenges. Our diverse group of participants, includes entrepreneurs, journalists, technologists, designers, marketers, investors and major players in the tech and media scene in New York.

Register for the workshop now!

Collab/Space New York is a production of PBS MediaShift, with premier sponsorship from the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Missouri School of Journalism and hosted by the Ford Foundation.

Key Speakers

Kimberly Lau is vice president and general manager, The Atlantic Digital. Lau joined The Atlantic in 2012 to oversee its digital initiatives, including audience engagement and expansion; strategic content and business partnerships; mobile, social media, and video product development; and new distribution and syndication platforms. Before joining The Atlantic, Lau was Vice President of Business Development for Hearst Magazines Digital Media.

Kareem Amin is the vice president for product at News Corp., where he’s been since last August, bringing his startup mindset to a traditional media company. Previously, Amin co-founded Frame, a New York-based startup focused on enabling e-commerce stores to quickly transform their websites into compelling touch experiences for the tablet. Frame was later aquired by Sailthru, where Amin became director of product engineering. He has worked as a program manager at Microsoft and was a software developer at McGill University, where he received his degree.

Presenting Companies

The nine following companies — including two in public media and one non-profit — will be presenting their innovation projects at Collab/Space:

NPR’s analytics dashboard
Ashoka & Google’s Course Builder: Empathy for Educators
NY Times’ Streamtools
Quartz’s Chartbuilder
WSJ’s modern CMS
NY Daily News’ Innovation Lab
Vox Media’s Cardstacks
Facebook’s Newswire
WFMU’s Audience Engine

Read more about the presenting startups here.

Reynolds Journalism Institute

RJI’s work crosses diverse specialties within journalism, including media convergence, editorial content and methods, the evolution of advertising, innovation in management and the impact of new technologies. It also includes varied fields on campus such as law, computer science, marketing, education and other disciplines. In 2012, the Foundation awarded RJI a $30.1 million endowment gift to guarantee permanent funding to pursue innovation, collaboration and research in media industries. Learn more about RJI here.

Ford Foundation HQ

The workshop will take place at a fantastic spot: The headquarters of the Ford Foundation near the United Nations in Manhattan. The foundation has been supporting principled news reporting in the United States that illuminates social problems, sparks accountability and inspires action. The foundation’s support enables distinguished news organizations to pursue high-quality content that reaches large and influential audiences, including historically under-served audiences. Learn more about how the foundation’s strategies and approaches shape its grant making.

How It Will Work

Media and tech companies in New York and beyond can apply to present at the workshop. We’ll choose 8 innovation projects at various stages of development, who will do presentations to the group and answer questions. They will list their 3 biggest challenges, whether that’s financial, technological, marketing, distribution or some other major challenge. Later in the day, we’ll divide into breakout groups around each project and develop solutions for their challenges. Solutions will be shared with the full group, and we’ll keep track of our 8 projects and provide updates and share their progress in coverage on MediaShift.

The goal will be to collaborate to help those projects succeed in the long run, creating interest groups for them on the spot (and afterwards), while also networking between the tech and media communities.  We’ll end the day with a mixer which is open to the community, to encourage further discussion and networking.

Registration

Registration costs $129 for professionals and $79 for students, plus Eventbrite fees. We will invite key people in the media and tech scenes in New York and around the country, and will open up registration to the public as well.

Please go to this Eventbrite page to register!

When?

July 8, 2014, from 9 am to 5 pm for the workshop, and 5:30 pm to 7:30 pm for the mixer.

Where?

Ford Foundation
Headquarters

320 East 43rd St.,
New York, NY 10017
(212) 573-5000
Google Map location

The Ford Foundation is located near the United Nations on the east side of midtown Manhattan, 6 blocks from the Queens Midtown Tunnel and 3 blocks from the 4, 5, 6 and 7 subway lines at Grand Central Station.

See you there!

Agenda

July 8

> Collab/Space NYC at Ford Foundation

> Targeted talks on collaboration and media innovation.

> Selected media innovation projects present their work and list their challenges.

> Networking lunch

> Collaboration exercise with improv comedy techniques

> Breakout into teams: Work collaboratively to help solve challenges for the projects, and present that to the group.

> Follow up: MediaShift will report back on how innovation projects rose to their challenges.

> Reception and mixer with drinks and food.

Mixer

After the workshop, we’ll convene for a happy hour mixer, with participants at the workshop as well as some folks in New York who couldn’t attend the workshop. If you’d like to attend the mixer, it’s free of charge, but please RSVP ahead of time to reserve your spot! We’ll serve wine and beer, and some light food.