Over the past decade, media labs have become an increasingly visible structure to create, catalyse and diffuse innovation within, and beyond, journalism. In this article, we offer insights into the multiple forms media labs can take, and how innovation in the media field is being organised through labs. As such, we focus on innovation processes and practices rather than innovative outcomes. Drawing on 45 semi-structured interviews with media labs around the globe, conducted between 2016 and 2018, this exploratory study explores the multifaceted nature of the media lab concept across academia, legacy media and independent structures. To help better understand the many different manifestations of the media lab construct encountered in our study, this article adopts a purposefully interdisciplinary approach spanning open innovation, institutional and social theories to illuminate and sense-make the global lab phenomena. First, we unpack the media lab construct by detailing the where, what and how of the media labs surveyed in this study. We then suggest that the many forms and functions of labs reveal a complex and nuanced picture of an innovation landscape. We trace this across the ways in which media labs perceive their own roles, and how they relate to wider networks and ecosystems that they engage with, specifically the extent of the openness of their activities. Ultimately, we suggest that media labs are in part shaped by mimetic, coercive and normative isomorphism: media labs are a replicated structure and signifier for innovation but do not exhibit absolute replication: they still retain local variation and mutation, which is influenced by localised factors or influences that are unique to them. They take myriad forms, are located across industry and academia, open, interdisciplinary and, for the main, focus on immediate innovation using user-centred innovation approaches.

在过去的十年中，媒体实验室已成为一种日益可见的结构，可以在新闻界内外创造，促进和传播创新。在本文中，我们提供了对媒体实验室可以采取的多种形式的见解，以及如何通过实验室在媒体领域组织创新。因此，我们专注于创新过程和实践，而不是创新成果。这项探索性研究以2016年至2018年间对全球媒体实验室进行的45次半结构化访谈为基础，探索了学术界，传统媒体和独立机构之间媒体实验室概念的多面性。为了更好地了解我们的研究中遇到的媒体实验室构建的许多不同表现形式，本文采用了涵盖开放式创新的有目的的跨学科方法，制度和社会理论来阐明和感悟全球实验室现象。首先，我们通过详细介绍本研究中调查的媒体实验室的位置，内容和方式来解开媒体实验室的结构。然后，我们建议实验室的多种形式和功能揭示了创新格局的复杂而细微的变化。我们通过媒体实验室认识到自己的角色的方式以及它们与所参与的更广泛的网络和生态系统的关系，特别是其活动的开放程度，来追溯这一点。最终，我们建议媒体实验室部分地由模拟，强制和规范同构构成：媒体实验室是创新的复制结构和标志，但不表现出绝对的复制性：它们仍保留局部变异和突变，受局部因素或它们独特的影响。它们采用多种形式，分布于整个行业和学术界，是开放的，跨学科的，并且主要集中在使用以用户为中心的创新方法上的即刻创新。