During the course of Project Red Stripe we have come to realise that assessment, reassessment and change are natural parts of the innovation process. As part of this process – and with some regret – we have decided that we had to move on from Lughenjo.

We went public with Lughenjo four weeks ago, primarily to test our idea on a wider audience. Since then we have continued our conversations with social entrepreneurs and NGOs and worked on producing a business plan.

The feedback that we received was overwhelmingly that Lughenjo was a good thing for us to do. There were, however, two problems. Firstly it was not obviously something that The Economist Group should do. Secondly, and more importantly, it became clear that there was not an immediate demand for a knowledge network from NGOs and social entrepreneurs.

The upshot was that we would have had to force the creation of the network from a demand point of view as well as marketing it to potential donors. This would have put a barrier in the way of us being able to grow the community quickly and therefore monetising it. And the one thing that pretty much all the people in the NGO community that we spoke to said, was that they expected us to run Lughenjo as a profitable business, because that would be our motivation to stick with it.

Lughenjo had already gone through several iterations before being made public, each time being refined into a simpler proposition. It had its roots in us wanting to make a ‘major difference’ and originally deciding to help achieve one of the UN’s millennium development goals – that of universal primary education by 2015. The idea that we came up with was to create a platform for digital donations with a novel map interface. It then became a skills exchange to help achieve universal primary education, before ultimately seeing the light of day as Lughenjo, aimed at helping anyone working on projects involving international development.

With Lughenjo we had always thought that after philanthropy we would be able to roll out other “verticals” that would be of value to The Economist Group’s high-end audience, but we hadn’t focused on that wider goal. The feedback that we got made us see the need to put the wider goal of a knowledge network at the front of our idea.

Maybe think of it as a for the Economist Group’s audience (let’s call it HiSpace).

For it to be engaging for a time-poor audience, it would need to deliver something that couldn’t easily be found elsewhere. Maybe a starting point would be to allow members to engage with each other to create knowledge repositories like a deeper, more targeted or Naver (the answers site that ranks above Google in South Korea) within closed or self-selecting groups of members.

You can see how the relationship between a HiSpace site and its members would be substantially different to that enjoyed by most readers of mainstream media – not only would members of HiSpace consume information but they would also be the principal generators of such information. Certainly the ability to manage this “3D journalism” will become increasingly important for mainstream media companies.

So, what’s next?

Well, Project Red Stripe ends on 27th July. Going forward, though, I will explore the issues around starting a HiSpace with the intention of coming up with what the next steps should be in November.

So, as Project Red Stripe ends, we hope that our legacy will be felt both in HiSpace, and in The Economist Group continuing to encourage this kind of innovation. We also hope to publish some feedback on what has and hasn’t worked for us during the process, as a practical guide for you to follow or dissect and to tell you how, with “So many good ideas to review! So little time!“, we came up with HiSpace.

Last, but not least we want to thank you for your ideas, feedback and support over the last six months, especially those of you in the NGO and social entrepreneur community who have given us your valuable time.

Farewell and maybe see you in HiSpace soon.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 26th, 2007 at 3:22 pm and is filed under Innovation, Ideas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.