The Swedish furniture giant, IKEA, is a household name and operates in ~50 countries around the world. The company’s mega stores and Swedish meatballs have become a cultural icon, while their affordable flat-packed designer furniture has generated a loyal, and in some cases, obsessive, fan base. As a long-time player in the cut-throat retail arena, IKEA has had to consistently innovate to keep ahead of the competition. 

In 2015, IKEA established an innovation lab, Space10, with the mission of exploring ideas and propositions that sit at the intersection of evolving societal trends and the company’s business. Whereas some innovation labs have a reputation for being vanity projects, Space10 has emerged as a place where problems of the present and the future are tackled in very practical ways. The lab has already yielded substantial value and was instrumental in the company’s digitization drive - for instance, Space10 led the development of what is now known as IKEA Place, an augmented reality app that allows customers to design and envision their homes with IKEA furniture. 

In this episode, we discuss how the Space10 model brings together a multidisciplinary team - in IKEA’s case, this includes anthropologists, designers, computer scientists and even aerospace engineers - with a diverse background from all over the world, to create a ‘hot house’ where new ideas and experiments can thrive. We explore how these principles can be applied to a wide range of companies, even those that may not necessarily have access to extensive innovation budgets.