I’m a Canadian, born and raised in Newfoundland (yes, a Newfie) and in Toronto. I’ve been living in Beijing since 1993 and have been working for the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) for the past three and a half years selling information about politics, economics and operating conditions in China to foreign multinationals. Previously, I helped a friend create China’s first recruitment web site - Zhaopin.com.

Yes! I’ve seen plenty of change in China in 13 years although I’ll often say that today’s Beijing doesn’t seem to change so much for me anymore. But I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t an interesting place to live and work.

Project Red Stripe is providing me with a rare opportunity. You can’t find a job on Zhaopin.com that says: “We’re a global, well-respected, media brand. We’re The Economist. Come along and help us figure out how we should innovate on the web, and feel free to use our content and brands in the process!”.

I’m a big ice hockey fan (Leafs) but (when in Rome) am eagerly anticipating gaining fluency in rugby, cricket and football. I love playing backgammon but probably showed my cards a little early as no one in the office wants to challenge me to a game now. Cooking is a passion but I can honestly say that I’ve been surprised about how good the food is in London! I do miss Sichuan food and salivate when I see the picture below.

If you’ve spoken with me in the last few weeks you’ll quickly discover that I miss my family greatly and count the days until they arrive in London.

You can contact me via steven at projectredstripe.com.

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.

This is an absolutely cracking ebook on the impact of the web on marketing, amongst other things - it’s here…

To track the locations we’ve been whilst to on Red Stripe business we’ve started a map which is, incidentally, stalker- friendly.

Marketing is not everyone’s cup of tea — but I love the challenges it provides. And Project Red Stripe combines all of them. It is also an opportunity to be part of a “big idea” and to work on something truly “new”, bringing all the various parts together to reality.

Before Red Stripe, I was Marketing Manager across all EMEA territories of the Economist Intelligence Unit. Prior to moving to London I worked for 6 years for an agent of The Economist Group marketing and selling EIU services across New Zealand and Australia (where I was born).

Outside of The Economist Group, mine is a career of varied sales and marketing experience. One of the highlights was being part of a team that came up with the winning bid for a major catering contract for the Sydney Olympics. I also helped to develop a website to service Australia’s leading CEOs (http://www.ceoforum.com.au) and its associated magazine, CEO Forum. I hope Red Stripe will be even more successful.

I can be contacted at .

I’d always thought that behavioural profiling involved fat policemen deciding that the mirror smasher murderer had a hair lip, or semi-crazed loons looking at Rorschach dots saying “It looks like butterflies in a field of daisies” when in fact he sees Mummy crying after Daddy came home ANGRY and DRUNK and JUST FOR ONCE WANTED THINGS TO BE RIGHT.

The Myer-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) doesn’t tell if you’re psycho but, rather, it creates a profile of each respondent assigning them a four letter type, using results from the 80 plus questions of the MBTI test. This helps finding out how you really are (”when you are at your most relaxed”, as Michael Thomas put it, the Economist Group’s training and development director, who explained the results to us).

But it is also useful to find out the strengths and weaknesses of a team. If you combine all the results, the Red Stripe team is I or E, N, T and J. What does this mean?

On the whole it’s a good thing, since INTJs “have orginal minds and great drive for their own ideas and purposes”, whereas ENTJs “Develop and implement comprehensive systems designed to solve organisational problems”.

We are strongly T (Thinking) so are fairly logical, but our weak F (Feeling) could mean that we will have difficulty thinking about how other people will react (who cares about them anyway?). Similarly our heavy N (iNtuition) means we’re great at seeing the big picture, less good on detail: so expect a groundbreaking site that doesn’t load well.

The bottom line: The team is more Judging than Perceiving, making us good planners. But we’ll have to make sure that we remember the details and people. Other than that, the omens are good.

This is what you find about me when you go to the “Media Directory” on Economist.com:

Ludwig Siegele started his journalistic career in 1990 as the Paris Business and Political Correspondent of Die Zeit. In 1995, he moved from France to California to write about the internet, first for Die Zeit and then for The Economist. In 1998 he became the US Technology Correspondent for The Economist, based near Silicon Valley. In 2003 Ludwig moved to Berlin as Germany correspondent.

Of course, there is more to the story. I’m married and have two great kids, Emma (10) and Milo (6), with whom I spend much of my free time (if I’m not out investigating the Berlin club scene with my equally great wife Alix, who is the first victim of Project Red Stripe: she will be a single parent in Berlin while I’m trying to be creative in London. Thank you so much, Ali!). I’ve studied economics and political science and went to journalism school in Cologne and Paris. I was born in Tübingen, a lovely town in southern Germany, 44 years ago (which makes me the team’s Methuselah).

And for those familiar with the Myers Briggs Type Indicator, this questionable personality questionnaire, much liked by the Economist management, which all Red Stripes had to take as part of a team awareness exercise this week: I’m an INTJ. “May appear so unyielding that others are afraid to approach or challenge them”, it says in my MBTI interpretative report. Guess my team mates are in for a tough time…

I am Stewart Robinson. I am a “Redstripeaholic”, actually should it be “Redstripic”? I have been on Red Stripe for 4 days now and I feel different. Before slipping up the slippery path into “redstripeism” I was a Technical Architect for the group’s Digital Media (web) team, where I helped to build Economist.com, CFO.com, CFOEurope.com and a few others.

I’ve been interested in technology and worked on websites for years. In 1999/2000, I was the only developer of ic24, then one of the UK’s biggest internet service providers. I also helped to develop a site platform for Trinity Mirror, which runs sites for several newspapers in the UK, including mirror.co.uk.

I’m not sure what we’ll get from Project Red Stripe, but I’m sure I want to do something different from what the Economist Group usually does. Perhaps we’ll do a deal with Toyota to produce a rubber car to help make parking easier. Any idea better than that please send to stewart (at) projectredstripe dot com or if you know of durable rubbers I can use let me know.

So, where are they hiding the ‘Secret 6′ you may ask (NB:monicker coined by a RLSq colleague).

We have now set up base in the offices of The Economist’s ad agency; AMV-BBDO at .

In this day and age, the words ‘ad agency’ tend to conjure up images of brightly coloured ‘meeting spaces’, open, airy offices, bean bags and barstools and inspiration abounding. My curiosity was certainly piqued when on the first day the receptionist directed us to the 3rd floor ‘just past the kitchen’.

In fact you do head for the kitchen, but then beside the fridge what appears to be an exit door leads to a tiny dark hall with another door to our room. The somewhat shocked/bemused look on Matthew Batstone’s face when he came to visit summed up the general reception to our new home quite nicely.

Dubbed the ‘ice box’ because it’s a little chilly, but more due to its stark, white walls housing a ‘6-pack of Red Stripes’, our office presents a stark reality to the ‘advertising dream’. As the name suggests there is nothing too inspiring about the inside of a fridge. In fact, with its over-sized table, too low chairs and curious access to a shower recess in one corner, our room is initially as soulless as a public hospital bedroom.

An ice box?

But this makes us sound ungrateful. We are not.

The resident staff are very kind and welcoming. But our office, like the endeavour itself is thoroughly grounding. We are starting completely from scratch. BYO inspiration (and decoration).

The exciting thing about the space is that the few visitors to come by so far, whilst initially a little disoriented by our ’simple and stark arrangement’; computer leads snaking across the table, coats piled in a corner, meeting room and work space all the one and same location; they quickly re-orient and seem to sense that they have entered a unique environment where a team has come together to try and truly make something unique happen and this means working with exactly what you’ve got ( or haven’t got).

Please excuse us if the invitations to visit are not immediately forthcoming. We are busy getting started.

But stay tuned to watch us and our idea develop - and for an expected ‘refurbishment’.

Think we got the tips of our toes wet today.

came into the kitchen room meeting room (or KRMR, as it is called by our hosts) today to lead a discussion about innovation and how we might structure the Red Stripe project.

We laid out some of our nagging questions before he spoke. How open should we be about the project? Should we ask customers/clients what they think? Should we open up the generation of ideas? Should our creation sit within The Economist Group? Should we use The Economist name when asking for ideas? What process do we use for evaluating ideas? How do we determine what is really innovative and what is just incremental?

Gerard mentioned that in one of his previous start-ups he created an innovation support group where senior executives who were interested in the process of innovation made their time available to people who wanted to present an idea, called “Idea Champions”. When listening to one of them, the group was not allowed to make negative comments before two postitive ones were made — making people more likely to come forward with ideas. Those that made it past this stage were put in front of an evaluation group who would apply tougher criteria. Later, ideas would be prioritised and budgets allocated.

It won’t be working quite the same with us and, in some ways, we’ve done it a little backwards. We got the budget first — based on the idea that we will come up with ideas. It’s good to know that the element of trust in some way already exists.

But we have to get going quickly. Gerard suggested a way to move forward, which we thought was worth following. In the the next two weeks, we will develop a framework to generate, analyse and cluster ideas. To finetune this process we will test it using ideas already floating around and solicit outside advice. After this, we’ll get serious — and use the process to come up with the real thing. By mid-March, hopefully, we’ll be in business.