Spark!Lab™ Smithsonian Inventive Creativity™ Kits

Smithsonian Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation × Creativity for Kids® (Faber-Castell® USA)

Role: VP, Product and Design  Category: Museum Licensing / STEAM Retail  Launch: 2016

The Brief

The Lemelson Center built Spark!Lab to teach invention the way invention actually happens: messy, hands-on, occasionally smelling faintly of glue. The challenge on my desk was translating a physical museum floor at the National Museum of American History, complete with worktables, tool walls, and a guitar wired to explain sound, into something that could ship in a box and survive a car ride home.

Museum-to-retail licensing has a specific failure mode. Do it wrong and you get a logo slapped on a generic craft kit. The Smithsonian name deserved better than a name change on a shelf filler.

The Work

I brokered the licensing agreement itself, which is its own small discipline of contracts, brand guidelines, and diplomatically worded emails. Then I led the creative work of turning a physical exhibit into a product line, which included:

• Structuring the license terms with the Lemelson Center so the retail line could carry the Spark!Lab name and invention framework without diluting either

• Directing an eight-kit product roster, each built around a scenario-based obstacle rather than a fixed outcome, from Inventor’s Studio to Invent Boundless Bridges, Invent a Motorized Robot, Invent Fantastic Flying Machines, Invent Super Shoes, Invent the Greatest Board Game, Invent Cool Cash, and Invent Terrific Toys

• Building the packaging and materials system to carry the same six-step invention process used on the actual museum floor, Think It, Explore It, Sketch It, Create It, Try It, Tweak It, so a kid at a kitchen table is running the identical process as a kid at Spark!Lab in Washington, DC

• Managing the creative through Faber-Castell’s development and compliance process to keep the line manufacturable at scale under the Smithsonian’s brand standards

The Translation

The hardest part of this brief was resisting the urge to simplify. A museum exhibit lets a kid fail forward in real time, with a facilitator two feet away and Smithsonian objects on hand for inspiration. A boxed product doesn’t have that luxury, so each kit had to supply its own obstacle, its own inspiration, and its own permission to get it wrong a few times before it’s right. Faber-Castell USA’s CEO put the philosophy plainly at launch: the kits exist to show kids they can be inventive, and that invention is more fun, not less, when it takes a few tries to land.

An MBA will tell you licensing is a revenue-sharing mechanism. What it doesn’t tell you is that the real negotiation is protecting the pedagogy inside the contract language.

The Outcome

The result is a retail line that functions as a genuine extension of the museum’s invention floor rather than a souvenir of it, sold at the National Museum of American History itself and through national retail partners, carrying the Smithsonian and Lemelson Center name into homes that will never make it to the Mall. Broker the deal well, and the gift shop becomes the exhibit’s second location.

Case study prepared by Delanie West, MBA — Founding Principal, Be Super Creative Source: Smithsonian Lemelson Center, “Creativity for Kids® Partners with Spark!Lab™ Smithsonian, Launches New Category of Products,” published August 24, 2016.