Planting the seed
It all started last year at the CIO Connect annual conference. CIO Connect is essentially a networking, professional and personal development organisation for senior IT executives (I then was the Economist Group’s CIO). I’ve found that, on the whole, these kind of events tend to consist of a load of IT people either wondering why they weren’t on the board or complaining that IT wasn’t taken seriously at their organisations.
This conference was a bit different.
One of the themes of the conference was innovation. I attended an interesting session during which people shared their experience with innovation at their organisations. There seemed to be two approaches how to tackle innovation – either as an integral part of their business or as a kind of offshoot. Most people at the meeting seemed to believe that it was better for innovation to be part of an organisation’s DNA.
This inspired me to make some changes in our IT organisation (but that’s for later). More important, at about the same time, The Economist Group set about reviewing its internet strategy. As part of this process we formed a group to discuss initiatives and co-ordinate efforts. It was at one of the meetings of this group that I first voiced the thought that we may not be particularly well placed to come up with the next big thing for The Economist Group on the web unless we changed some of our decision making processes.
In the time since the CIO Connect conference I think that I’d realised that to try something truly new we would need to throw off some of the shackles that had served us so well in growing and developing our businesses to date.
People at the Economist Group are fantastic at doing what they do because of their focus and in-depth knowledge. That’s not to say that that they aren’t creative, but my suspicion was that a lot of our creativity and innovation was focussed on development of what we already had. Ideas could be strangled at inception because of the power of the brand, for example; that is, the fear of something different detracting from our brand.
My suggestion for how we might capture that different idea was to take an idea to market without going through any of the process normally applied to new products or services. Add to that one of the themes from the CIO Connect session (that has also been cited by the late Peter Drucker as creating an environment for innovation): put a constraint on resources but, at the same time, throw open the playing field.
Hence my proposal: give me £100k, my choice of five people from the Group for six months, impose no other constraints and allow us to use any brand or content that the Group owned — and I will come up with some truly innovative ideas.
Thus Project Red Stripe was conceived. The discussion moved on, but the seed was planted. Stay tuned.
