Business Innovation Factory Experience Labs

Taking ideas from the whiteboard into the real world. Each year, BIF focuses on a small portfolio of projects in big-win areas that bring partners together to design and test new solutions in a real world laboratory.

Through projects in the BIF Experience Labs, we seek to help organizations collaborate across traditional boundaries to design, test and implement new systems-level solutions in areas like education, health care, and customer experience. We work to offer our partners an opportunity to explore new business models and develop and test new models for delivering value across the public and private sectors.

We are singularly focused on the ambitious end of radically redesigning the delivery of value to focus on the customer, whether that customer is a student, patient, or citizen.

Why Experiment?

We believe that complex, game-changing innovation can only be tried, tested and proven in real-world environments. To find the next big idea, innovators need an environment where they can explore, experiment and implement with less risk and successfully transfer what they’ve learned back into their organizations.

BIF’s unique non-profit platform creates a neutral platform where partners from across industries and disciplines can design and test big-win innovations in a low-risk environment, and with help from the BIF team, translation their work into new models for delivering value across the public and private sectors.

BIF has located itself in Rhode Island for an important reason: the ecosystem is ideal for experimentation.

We believe that the only practical way to accelerate systems-level innovation is to test new business models in smaller, more manageable environments. With incredible demographic, industrial and geographical diversity in a small footprint, plus highly accessible public and private sector networks, Rhode Island’s unique ecosystem provides the optimal conditions to explore and test new business models. Located between Boston and New York City, Rhode Island also has direct access to a rich extended talent pool from which BIF selects its project advisors and designers.

Harnessing the power for real work results

Collaborative Innovation Projects in the BIF Experience Labs enable innovators to:

• Test new business model designs and create proofs-of-concept;
• Learn how others overcome implementation challenges;
• Understand implementation realities to speed time-to-scale;
• Justify the return on innovation investment.

BIF offers Experience Lab partners access to this unique innovation test bed — a real-life laboratory where innovators can think big, start small and scale fast. We call this capability Innovation@Scale.