Since Project Red Stripe officially ended, there’s been some discussion in the blogosphere about what we did and how we should have done things differently. As I mentioned, I’m writing up our experiences and you’ll be able to read about what did and didn’t work for us soon. But I thought that it was worth addressing some of the points that have been raised as I move into the next phase back at Economist towers.
And that’s the first point - I’m still here, working on the next steps, but more of that later.
Jeff Jarvis started off, following up on a piece on PaidContent.org, by saying that the need to focus on making a profit would now be a criteria that he would impose on his students for their News Innovation project at CUNY. Neil McIntosh had a different point to make, suggesting that innovation doesn’t have to take a big bang approach, but that results could be gotten from small, incremental building out of existing ideas. Both Suw Charman and Jeff then added that, to be successful, perhaps innovation projects needed to work on problems that the team had experienced. Then this week Jeff rounded some of these issues up in his Guardian column (reg. req’d.) saying that “We need new and innovative journalistic products and companies with sustainable (read profitable) business models. We need to pay for journalism” and wondering “whether and how innovation can spring from within.”
It’s not for nothing that providing advice on how to innovate is a massive business. I think that most people that have tried it will agree that there’s no silver bullet, but that you can do some things to help foster an innovative approach.
Taking Jeff’s point first, should one outcome from an innovation project be that the idea needs to make money? I disagree with Jeff on this. Of course it should in the long run, but focusing on this as an objective will cut short many ideas. When Page and Brin created their search engine it’s generally agreed that they didn’t have a business model in mind. And when they did get one, the idea of keyword advertising was not new. One commenter also raises the Xerox PARC connundrum - that great innovations came out of PARC but that Xerox didn’t use them. This is slightly unfair in that many of the computing innovations were secondary to what Xerox had set PARC up to do and that Xerox did benefit hugely from printing innovations such as the laser printer.
This leads to the another question. Can innovation come from within? I think that the answer to this one is two-fold. Organisations should try hard to put innovation into their DNA, but should also realise that it’s difficult to do when they’re successful. Individuals at high-performing companies will naturally gravitate towards making sure that they do all that they can to maximise their outcomes, whether these are revenues, articles written or number of customers. Despite what Google say about their engineers spending 20% of their time on their own ideas, priorities get in the way. For these reasons it can make sense to try and innovate outside of up-and-running business units with their attendent financial targets. However, this approach does not exlcude incremental (I dislike that word when used to describe innovation, but let’s leave it for now) development of ideas within business units - The Economist’s recent launch of an audio edition being a good example of this.
As to the question of to what extent innovators need to experience a problem, I’m pragmatic on this. All of us experience problems that we don’t necessarily fix through innovation and lots of the stories about how new products came about are just good stories that can be easily identified with. I don’t doubt that if our brief had been tighter that we would have saved ourselves some time, but what would it have been? In the end we postulated that The Econiomist Group was reliant on revenues from a print product that was pretty much unique in that it was growing in a declining market. Our problem was therefore how to get a high-end audience in the tens of millions to interact online. As part of our process we found that Lughenjo was probably not a starting point. Will a service like Lughenjo see the light of day in the next few years? Definitely.
Jeff’s last question about “whether … innovation can spring from within” has its roots in a different problem. His starting point was that innovative journalistic products are needed (for an audience). What if the starting point was that revenues from an audience are needed? It doesn’t necessarily follow that journalism is the best or only way to do this. eBay and Craigslist don’t do journalism, but between them they’ve undermined many newspapers’ business models. So yes, we need to find ways to pay for journalism but to find sustainable models we may need to widen our scope and maybe ask different questions.
The good news is that the one thing that pretty much everyone agreed on was that it’s essential for media companies to become more innovative and through Project Red Stripe we’ve got a head start. And that we’re continuing that through me working on the HiSpace idea.
I’ll keep you posted on developments as they happen.
