How to Find the Innovation ‘Off’ Switch (In One Easy Step)
In 2016, Campaign announced: “Ogilvy Labs shuts down.” For many people, it was just another industry story in a busy news week. For those of us who had built and run the Lab, it was something else entirely: a live demonstration of how large organisations locate and press the innovation off switch.
Annette King, the newly appointed chief executive at the time of Ogilvy & Mather UK, said: "Innovation has always been an integral part of the Ogilvy DNA. Ogilvy Labs pioneered the way we approached innovation and, over its tenur,e helped us successfully embed innovative thinking and campaigns into each of our agencies and many of our award-winning clients.
"Ogilvy Labs’ job is now done as a separate Ogilvy entity, as each agency continues to innovate within its own specialist area and collaboratively across the Ogilvy Group."
The steps are almost comically simple:
Create a lab for the future
Set up a space at the edge of the organisation. Fill it with curious, slightly awkward people. Ask them to explore emerging tech, new behaviours, and unfamiliar partners. Tell them they’re “the future”.Let it work
Give them enough freedom to prove that different ways of working are possible: faster experiments, new commercial models, real collaborations with start‑ups and makers. Clients notice. Talent notices. The culture twitches.Feel uncomfortable
At some point, the lab stops being a harmless sideshow. It starts exposing where the core business is slow, risk‑averse, or stuck in old patterns. It asks awkward questions. It shows value you can’t easily capture in a quarterly report.Reframe it as a cost
Then the numbers tighten. Someone, somewhere, looks down a spreadsheet and decides that a self‑funded R&D unit, or a small team of intrapreneurs, is now a “nice to have”. The story becomes “focus on the core”, “discipline”, “efficiency”.Switch it off
The easiest thing in the world. One decision, one line in a budget meeting, and the lab is gone.
What never gets written into those announcements is the long‑term cost:
The bridge to the start‑up ecosystem that quietly collapses.
The signal it sends to your Rough Diamonds is that it’s safer not to care too much.
The loss of a safe space to ask “what if?” before the market asks it for you.
Here’s the irony. In shutting labs, many organisations thought they were turning off an optional extra. In reality, they were turning off one of the few mechanisms they had for learning at the speed of change.
Almost ten years on, the world those Labs were built for has well and truly arrived. AI, new interfaces, new behaviours, new expectations everywhere. The question for leaders today isn’t “should we have an innovation lab again?” It’s more uncomfortable:
