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.

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 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.

Surfing over lunch time brought me to a couple of interesting stories:

We’ve touched on creating a global presence but today’s Guardian story about WSJ expanding around the world puts some things into perspective for us as we have talked about some of these very issues already.

I’ve got to note a couple of things.

“To get people to pay for it you really have to be offering something that gives someone an edge,” [Alan Flitcroft, UK head of media at Ernst & Young] says. “Either it gives you an edge because you are getting it sooner than the rest of the world, or it has such a level of research or sensitivity that it gives you something you can’t get from surfing the web generally.”

We certainly don’t fit into the first category that Alan mentions above but I’d like to think we do the second point well.

And then this quote about China:

WSJ.com launched a Chinese language site in 2002 that now has more than 273,000 registered users and clocks up almost 3 million page views a month.

The numbers are probably right - I’m pretty sure, though, that it’s losing money. Maybe my colleagues in China might care to comment. FT.com’s Chinese language web site is also in the red.

Can’t help but dreaming that had this article been written six months later there would be mention of The Economist Group’s efforts.

The other question which has been nagging us is whether we should do something within the confines of The Economist Group or should we do something completely different. Maybe it’s not too late to get into the stem cell market.

Matthew Batstone, The Economist Group’s marketing and strategy director, wouldn’t put it quite this way. But this was one of the takeaways from his presentation to the Red Stripe team about the group’s strategy, particularly online. Unfortunately, we cannot blog about it in detail - it’s confidential and has only just been approved. But Matthew certainly won’t kill us for writing that, in his view, the Internet is not a threat for The Economist Group, but an opportunity. While other publications are suffering from ads and readers moving online (one major US business weekly, which shall remain unnamed, has apparently lost half of its revenues in the past 5 years, pushing it deeply into red territory), the Economist’s ad revenues are up and the group has never been more profitable. Although the group’s sites (Economist.com, CFO.com, etc.) could certainly have been stronger, Matthew explains, we are in a good place - and are able to be more experimental about what we do on the Internet. Hence Project Red Stripe, among other things. “Be bold and don’t worry about the (executive) board”, were his parting words. We’ll put this in our mission statement…

Hi I’m Tom Shelley AKA The Blogman. I acquired this (un)enviable moniker by insisting on talking about new media from the moment I arrived at The Economist just eleven months ago. I must admit that at times it was frustrating, I couldn’t understand why no one else was bouncing off the walls at all the fresh possibilities out there.

Then the announcement of Project Redstripe landed in my inbox. I applied. I was accepted. Now, I find myself on an innovation team that has six months to do something amazing with any of The Economist Group brands and any of The Economist Group content - I’m so pumped about this my excitement glands must have stretchmarks.

Stay looking to this blog and my own - The Fedoral Reserve - to find out more about Tom in Wonderland, which is how I feel. I’m interested in many areas of the web with a few favourites being social networks, citizen journalism and social news. Check out - very mature, I know. I’ll try to control my wonderment and can’t wait to really get cracking into the Redstripe.

If you’ve got any questions, or suggestions, please leave them in the comments or email me at tom [at] projectredstripe dot com.