Trying to nail down the meaning of “innovative” is an intellectual challenge: it is one of those weasel words that keep slipping away. But we also have to cope with duller legal stuff: who owns those ideas that are submitted to Project Red Stripe? If we don’t deal with this issue from the start, it could come back to haunt us later – particularly if we dream up a money maker.

The fine print on the idea-gathering sites mentioned earlier is clear, though hidden in lengthy legalese. In short: we can do whatever we want with your ideas. Dell’s Ideastorm goes even further, essentially forbidding users from otherwise marketing their idea. Dell grants itself an “exclusive option” to purchase the idea, plus related materials, within a year. “If we exercise the option, you agree to accept payment in the amount of $1000 or value in kind at Dell’s discretion”, it declares in its “Terms of Service”.

We won’t go this far, but will likely have to take a similar path: the alternatives are far too messy. What if several people come up with similar ideas? What if we had the same idea ourselves? What if we combine several ideas?

Still, we won’t just take an idea and run with it. We intend to give credit where credit is due — even if we don’t know yet exactly how. And, perhaps even more enticing, we will further involve those making significant contributions in Project Red Stripe.

As you can probably surmise from reading the blog posts, we are going to ask people outside of Project Red Stripe to share with us their ideas about innovative things that The Economist Group can do on the internet.

We’ve been spending considerable time discussing our definition of ‘innovative’. The way in which we look at ideas will very much be based on how we define what is innovative. Is the iPod innovative? By definition, Apple did not invent the digital music player. But the way in which they packaged and marketed their player with their own web-based shop front (iTunes) was, at the time, unique.

This Fast Company article claims that Apple’s innovations have been powerful, successful, useful and cool (as opposed to other companies whose innovations have been deemed precommercial, superseded, frivolous or destructive). While these four words are broad in meaning, perhaps we need to only ask if an idea fits these four criteria to call it innovative.

This story about Apple is a little dated - it was written in January, 2004 (it’s funny how the author writes about dim profits for Apple in 2003 despite the success of the iPod - it’s gone since then). I wonder if today’s definition of innovation would vary somewhat, especially when looking at the internet. While I do hope that the idea we choose ends up being powerful, successful, useful and cool, I might not mind that it was precommercial (we could create a business that might not have a business model for another 5 years) or superseded (they still sell the Polaroid camera, don’t they?). I agree that we wouldn’t want to create something that is frivolous but surely ‘disruptive’ can replace ‘destructive’.

What other criteria should we use to determine if an idea is innovative? Some of the questions that have made it on to my list include: Does the idea have that ‘wow’ factor? Does this idea solve a problem or meet a need? I believe that the team’s varied backgrounds will have a positive influence on the decision making - here’s hoping that we can come to a shared definition for innovation.

One of the most overused quotes about the future is that it is already here, just unevenly distributed (it is usually attributed to William Gibson, a noted American science fiction author). But, one might add, at some point the future tends to cluster.

This is apparently happening with companies hoping to gather ideas from the outside world. After writing about our plan to do this earlier this week, I did some research to see whether there are any examples. And lo and behold there may be a trend. Last week, two noted firms launched idea-gathering sites: Yahoo! and Dell.

These services, called Yahoo! Suggestion Board and Dell Ideastorm respectively, join a raft of others that went live in recent months. Salesforce.com has a site where customers can make suggestions (its software in fact also powers Ideastorm). IdeaSplicing is an open-source effort to gather and discuss ideas. And then there are firms to provide “idea management” software or services such as Crispyideas, Brightidea and imaginatik.

Yet most interesting for our purposes are Yahoo! and Dell. Both services work in essentially the same way. Users first fill out a web form with one box that categorizes the idea (Ideastorm also allows for easy tagging) and another for a brief description (in Yahoo!’s case no more than 1,500 characters). After the “submit” button is clicked, the idea is published on an online suggestion board, where other users can comment on ideas and vote on it. Both services look a lot like , the popular social news site, triggering accusations of plagiarism in the blogosphere.

More important is the question of how popular these sites will be and what kind of ideas they will gather. Both are already populated with hundreds of suggestions (in fact, at the end of this week, there were more than 1,500 on Ideastorm). Yet many are two-liners, constituting customer complaints rather than innovative ideas. “I received more than 30 e-mails from so called ‘procurement agents’ in England”, is one of the most popular entries on the suggestion board for Yahoo! Autos (instead of letting people tag their suggestions, Yahoo! has such boards for each of its services). Ideastorm, so far, seems mostly to be a vehicle for customers to vent their frustration that Dell computers don’t come with Linux or other open-source software pre-installed for free.

These are early days, of course. Such suggestions may well be quite useful for Yahoo! and Dell to gauge what their customers want. They do suggest, however, that we must work hard to ensure that we collect high-quality ideas from a wide spectrum of people. Speaking of ideas: if you’ve got one on how we can do this – fire away below in the comment form.

Just so we’re clear, I’m this Mike Seery, not this one.

I’m going to take you on a journey of my use of computers…

The first computer that I worked on was a Research Machines Ltd 380Z (at school; skipping the punched cards submitted to UCL). The next was an ACT Sirius 1 (University; for my final year project - see below), followed by a Sperry 1100/62 (first job, at the Cabinet Office, where I ported the model used to doctor seasonally adjust economic data to a PC), then a DEC Vax using Mimer (at British Gas, now National Grid, to run modelling programs to make sure that there was enough gas to go round!).

Can you see the pattern, yet?

My next job was at Rudolf Wolff (I left just before it was sold to Enron, who, it turned out, didn’t have the money to buy it in the first place, but that’s another story) where I used DEC Alphas and installed a Bay Networks local area network (rather than using Cisco kit).

I’ll help you out. Most of the companies (save Research Machines and Mimer) or products no longer exist, though their legacies certainly do.

Since I joined The Economist, however, things have looked a bit better.
Sun Microsystems is just about still around as is Oracle and, indeed, the content management system that we developed for Economist.com (which incidentally meant that we developed Economist.com V3 from scratch for less than people were paying for Vignette at the time). The use of Oracle to power Economist.com could have been a close run thing with Sybase, but I learned from my Mimer days that in the hi-tech real world paper and scissors game, marketing beats technology. I also got married to Becky whilst at The Economist (and still am, of course) so the omens are looking good for Project Red Stripe to create a lasting legacy. Outside work, my passions are Becky (also at one time known as DataDiva - definitely not Blues Country or Folk), Jake and Arsenal.As for innovation, here’s my choice of the top three innovations of my lifetime (that I also own):

1. Domestic smoke alarm
2. Waterfield Designs Cargo bag with paragliding buckle
3. iPod (but only with iTunes and the Apple Music Store)

You can contact me via mike at projectredstripe.com.

What are they doing other than visiting watering holes on Fleet Street or putting themselves through emotionally draining team-building exercises? Readers of this blog may be excused for asking this question. After all, the postings here have been somewhat “navel gazing”, as Mike put it kindly.

But don’t worry, we’ve been working hard on other things as well. And we will now write more about them.

We are currently spending much of our time developing a process to gather ideas from the outside world. So expect to shortly see a “call for ideas” here. To cast our net widely, we’ll also e-mail it, for instance, to readers of The Economist, post it in the blogosphere and do some advertising. Why are we doing this? Because we think that we don’t have all the answers.

It is hard to predict how many ideas we’ll receive. So the other main item on our to-do list is to come up with a robust mechanism to sift and analyse the submissions.

We sure hope that such openness and our processes are innovative in themselves. But if you know of companies that have gone down a similar path to come up with something innovative on the web, please let us know.

Last week, Javier Bajer paid us a visit by phone from Argentina, where he is on a speaking tour. When not in his native country or talking to us, this well-known consultant helps the senior management teams of such global giants as HP and Shell to become more effective.

We might have waited for Javier to come back to London (and we will meet him there in person soon, to repeat the exercise). But given that we only have six months, we needed his help fast – to speed up the process of turning us into an efficient team (which, as the Lego exercise clearly showed, we are not yet).

Javier is not a fan of personality assessment tests such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). He doesn’t think that people are as set in their ways as these tests suggest, but that their belief systems, for instance, can – and should – change.

It is crucial for a team to avoid members’ beliefs becoming set in stone, he argues, particularly with respect to each other. “If beliefs such as ‘he is too technical’ or ‘he doesn’t know anything about marketing’ become a pattern, a team is bound to get stuck.”

Getting team members to talk openly about themselves, thus reaching a higher level of trust, is not just a way to avoid such blockage, but to help teams under high pressure to produce results. As a kind of catalyst for openness, his company, Possibilate, has come up with a tool called Leadership Alignment Tool (LAT), which looks rather like a child’s wooden toy.

Its purpose is to help team members find out whether they are out of whack, or “misaligned” in Javier’s words. First he made us jot down our “beliefs”, “intentions”, “promises” and “actions”. Then we had to move the four blocks of the LAT (each representing one of the above categories) in such a way as to show any perceived misalignments between them. Finally, we explained the blocks’ positions and come up with ways to get them better aligned.

Without going into details, the LAT is not easy to use, as Javier had warned us before. Some of us are still not sure whether we have actually understood what we are supposed to do. But by the time we finished running through everyone’s “misalignments”, we had definitely achieved, at times very emotionally, a heightened sense of understanding about ourselves, other team members and the project.

As a team with the task of coming up with something truly innovative on the web, we couldn’t help having a look at a new service provided by Yahoo called “Pipes”. After all, Tim O’Reilly of Web 2.0 fame has called it “a milestone in the history of the internet”.

Although Pipes is still showing its youth, we do agree. For the first time, a service lets even less-techy souls build their own “mashups” — combining several data feeds to create a new one.

In this simple example, I have taken articles from Economist.com’s news analysis section and pushed their headlines through the search function of , a community picture site.

The result is not very impressive: just some seemingly random pictures. But it could be improved by combining them with the articles (though I haven’t yet figured out whether this is possible).

So why are we interested? Because Pipes is likely to again demonstrate the one approach that really works on the internet: give people easy to use tools – and they will come up with great new things.

Exposing one’s soul is not something I would naturally choose to do, let alone in public. To share my deepest thoughts and concerns is a practice I would usually reserve for a select and intimate few. Yet the web in its current incarnation seems to challenge this notion head on.

Through blogs and social forums, not only does one expose oneself to an unknown audience. This exposure also invites both judgement and interaction. I am not comfortable with this exposure. As a result, I find blogging difficult.

I like to be able to define my audience and to manage both the output and likely level of interaction. It takes a newly sought boldness to relax these requirements, to just write and be open to whatever the web will offer up in response, if anything.

Perhaps this is not that different from what is happening in real life. In dealing with other people, using a product or service and consuming information we all naturally make assessments and form opinions. The interactivity of much of the web with its comment and ranking features makes it easier for all these thoughts to be fed back. This can be a positive thing, for this feedback could lead to ongoing improvement.

I approach this world with hesitation. I see that perhaps the potential costs to pride, control and privacy may be worth the possible benefits.

Sometimes, playing with Lego can help to build a team. A few days ago, Mike burst into the office, telling us to jointly re-construct a model out of Lego he had previously placed in another room. The rules were that we needed to do this in 20 minutes or less and that only one person was allowed in the other room at a time. To complicate things, he had asked me (Steve) beforehand to play the role of saboteur and to change the original model a little bit every time I went into the room.

Making our first mistake, the only thing the team agreed upfront was that we should each take a look at the model first. And just as soon as we agreed on this, each person went into the room, came out, and started building a piece of the model. Someone suggested that we each handle a specific area of the model, but this idea was only loosely followed. We spent most of our time queuing to get into the shower room and I spent most of my time moving the pieces around, trying hard not to make any clicking noises.

But we did even worse. Five minutes into the exercise, Mike told the team that one of us was sabotaging the project by moving pieces around. Accusations started to fly. I thought about how the team was going to root me out. Some of us continued to build, some decided to sit and some thought about trying to root me out. I just made sure that I timed my changes in such a way as not to arouse suspicion. The team continued to try to build and compensate for the changes the saboteur was making.

When the exercise had finished we were asked to guess who the saboteur was and to explain our rationale for choosing that person. Jo guessed first and had to explain her rationale for choosing Ludwig. Luckily I had to go second and also chose Ludwig, explaining that he had followed me into the room on one occasion and that I had gone in again after him and saw that he made a change - a great lie! Tom and Stew named Ludwig, too. Ludwig, to his credit, chose me, saying that I had been too quiet and was being rational throughout the exercise.

With or without a saboteur, we made a total mess of this exercise. We did not make a plan. We did not deal with adversity. We did not work as a team. We realized afterwards that one person could have recreated the model accurately within the time period given without any help from the others. Needless to say that we need to do better when we tackle the real model.

Laughter and wonderment, peering around the room in the half darkness, crawling under the table to follow the path to “the inferno”. Not in my wildest dreams did I think that this would be part of my work at Project Red Stripe. But it happened during one of our team-building exercises, for which Mike had asked us to make and present a map showing “where we’ve been last week”. Later, he added that we will get to vote to pick the best map — apparently to motivate us and to simulate decision making.

Three of our team (Mike, Stew and Steve) produced variations on the more traditional geographic solution, tracing on paper or digitally where we had been in London, for instance during our pub crawl. Steve showed to full effect the use of (this nifty piece of software which lets you surf high-resolution satellite images). He took us on a digital flight around the earth, for instance showing us Canada, where he was born, and his home in Beijing.

The others interpreted the task at hand more metaphorically. Ludwig provided a rather cerebral response. Using a mind-mapping program called The Brain, he showed the links between the various ideas and concepts discussed over the past week. Ludwig would like to use the software to keep track of our future discussions, thus developing the Red Stripe brain.

Mine was a more feely-touchy map (maybe it was the ‘F’ in my MBTI profile coming out). It detailed the emotional highs and lows over the past week, the trepidation, the excitement, the doubt and the effort. I see it as the landscape of the project thus far, which we have probably all traversed.

And finally, it was Tom who had us crawling under the table, stepping over a river of water glasses perilously balanced on the spiral staircase in our office, and marveling at his post-it note mobiles. Tom’s map was a 3D experience of our ideas, people, emotions and experiences so far.

So it was a very illustrative and fascinating exercise, demonstrating how differently people can both view the world and portray it. I hope we’ll be as creative when it comes to developing the real thing. By the way, the winner of our map competition was Steven.