Once of the trends I noticed in 2012 was retailers creating standalone innovation labs. The ones that seem to get the most notice are Walmart Lab and Nordstrom Lab, most likely because they have great marketing to compliment their inventions. Two new labs that just started are the Staples Velocity Lab and the Home Depot Lab. In most cases these labs stem from acquiring a start-up, and not wanting to crush the start-up spirit, the retailer keeps the company separate.
Having a separate lab has a few important advantages. First, since its not part of the larger IT organization it doesn't get sucked into fire fighting, which can be a huge distraction. Also, its not bogged down by enterprise-class software development processes that tend to slow things down. An important part of innovation is constant tweaking that can't be documented up-front. Having labs focused on retail-specific solutions keeps a retailer's edge.
At Oracle Retail we established the Retail Applied Research (RAR) team a couple years ago under the leadership of John Yopp. They research emerging technology, collaborate with other labs, and convert ideas into prototypes in a nimble fashion. Their efforts help us better assess the value of ideas and de-risk some of the technology. This year we'll be demonstrating two of their projects in our booth at NRF. We'll be demonstrating an Isis payment using NFC with our Mobile POS running on a Verifone sled. Additionally, we'll be showing how voice-response can speed transactions on our Mobile POS.
To foster the innovative spirit, we also have an annual Science Fair in our R&D organization. Small teams with innovative ideas are given the week of NRF to build prototypes which are then judged based on originality, execution, and presentation. Last year we had some pretty cool ideas using iPhones and Twitter that led to patent applications.
Technology doesn't stand still, so I'm hoping that more retailers create separate labs to incubate ideas in 2013. Nobody can afford to stand still.