What do Walmart, Facebook, and Lockheed Martin have in common? They all recently unveiled lavish new innovation labs. These kinds of labs go by different names — accelerators, business incubators, research hubs — and my research suggests their numbers are growing. Over half of financial services firms have started their own creative spaces, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a health care company or retailer without at least one innovation lab, whether it’s a conference room with sticky notes or a 20,000-square-foot incubator space, like the one launched by Starbucks in November of last year.
