The Committee to Nuke Elysium

About a year ago, the retailer quietly began staffing up Lowe’s Innovation Labs, a group meant to lead innovation by testing and creating technologies, as well as partnering with startups. Kyle Nel, executive director, leads the labs in Los Angeles and San Francisco, as well as another under construction in Boulder, Colo. The labs focus on “uncommon partnerships” with Singularity University and SciFutures, for example.

“A lot of companies have outside spaces, but we approach it in a different way, through science-fiction prototyping,” said Mr. Nel, who reports to Lowe’s Chief Information Officer Paul Ramsay. “You take all of your market research, all of your trend data and hire professional science-fiction writers. And they write real stories with conflict and resolution and characters. We turned it into a comic book and created possible stories or visions of the future.”

One of those visions involved giving homeowners the ability to envision remodeling projects with augmented reality. “Because it was a sci-fi story, it really opened up people’s imaginations to understand what was possible,” Mr. Nel said. “Now that we’ve gone through it, it seems weird we wouldn’t work in this way.”

“We look at emerging tech, consumer insights, unmet needs and pain points, give them to sci-fi writers and create preferred futures,” said Ari Popper, founder and co-CEO of SciFutures, a self-described “technology, research and foresight agency” that counts Hershey, Del Monte and PepsiCo among its clients. “Technology removes a lot of the barriers and unmet needs and pain points associated with the visualization of home improvement.”