A while back, the Economist set up Project Red Stripe, an attempt to incubate innovation within the Economist group. It was an unmitigated failure, having developed one substantial (although misguided) idea and then imploded after 6 months. But as we’ve already established, failure is nothing to be scared of and something to be learned from. Sure enough, the elves at the Economist Andrew Carey at Triarchy Press wrote a book about it, which he also made available on a book blog, if you don’t want to shell out cold hard cash in these recessionary times.
You can also download an internal note (PDF) which gives you the basics. Not all of their points are strictly relevant to your average NGO – they’re particularly interested in the dynamics of small teams within an organisation – but there’s some useful stuff in there even if you disagree with their points:
- Have a strategy for team selection
- Be open at your peril
- People shouldn’t own ideas
- Agree a single outcome
- Don’t try to produce a business plan
- Understand the trade-offs with verification
- Talk to people outside the team
If you want to read something more substantial but still free, innovation guru Frans Johansson has made his book The Medici Effect (PDF) available as a free PDF (which might have cost him money but is clearly valuable in reputational terms – I applaud him). Johansson takes entire chapters to say what could be said in a paragraph, but the book is well-written and engaging. His key insight is that innovation is more likely to happen at the intersection of different cultures, where the number of possible combinations of ideas rises exponentially. That sounds like the humanitarian sector to me – so where’s the innovation that should be exploding in our offices?
If anybody has any links to other useful resources on innovation, feel free to leave them in the comments.
UPDATE: Thanks to Andrew Carey for correcting the inaccuracies in my original post.
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I’m puzzled at your angle is this post. Maybe there’s some history between you and The Economist, not sure?
Just to set the record straight, I wrote the book that you mention (Inside Project Red Stripe). I have no connection with The Economist and I’m not an elf. The Economist had no input whatsoever into the book, although I did show it to team members before publication and asked them if there were any factual inaccuracies that they wanted me to change or if they were concerned about my intruding on their privacy in any way. They asked for, and I willingly made, a handful of very minor changes.
The pdf that you mention is a pdf of an internal report on the project. There is no connection between that and my book.
You can also read my book free, online at http://www.projectredstripe.blogspot.com
You say the project was an unmitigated failure. I have no axe to grind and to my mind it was absolutely not an unmitigated failure. I don’t think anything in the book or in the Economist report would give any credence to that idea. I wonder why you say it.
Hi Andrew – first of all, thanks for correcting me. I don’t have any history with the Economist, except as a regular reader.
I say that the project was a failure based on the fact that its stated goal (as I understood) was to create “an innovative and web-based product, service or business model by July 2007″. It didn’t achieve this goal, so I feel fairly comfortable saying that it failed. However I may be unfair when I say that it was an “unmitigated” failure – clearly some valuable lessons were learned. Possibly development has continued within the Economist, although we haven’t seen anything public since the end of the project, so it’s hard to say.
I’d be genuinely interested to know on what grounds you think the project wasn’t a failure. If you read back through the previous posts on innovation on this blog, you’ll see that one of the positions I’ve moved towards is that our sector needs to take failure as an opportunity for learning, rather than a rod to beat ourselves with. Calling Project Red Stripe a failure in this context is not as negative as this post alone might suggest.
Hi Paul,
Well the failure question is an interesting one. I, of course, agree that failure is the only thing we can really learn from (which is your point), and I quote Russell Ackoff to that effect: ‘managers cannot learn from doing things right; only from doing things wrong’.
But, that aside, the team’s objective was to develop and launch an innovative product, service or business model on the web.
1) They came up with lots of ideas (some of which are now appearing on The Economist website, though as much by osmosis as a direct result of Project Red Stripe).
2) They developed in detail the plans and infrastructure for an online philanthropy site (Lughenjo) which pulled together NGOs, professional advisers and corporate and private donors in a not-for-profit model. (Presumably that’s how you got interested). They didn’t launch it (though they ‘should have’ if they’d followed their brief to the letter) because they didn’t want to commit The Economist to a high profile venture like Lughenjo without getting support from the senior management team. The management team didn’t want to do Lughenjo. So that’s a decision not to proceed from the project sponsor, but not what I’d call an unmitigated failure.
3) They developed in less detail (because of lack of time after the rejection of Lughenjo) plans for a social networking site for Economist readers (Hi-Space). The senior management team didn’t want to do it.
So we’re starting to see a pattern here. But, to my eyes, not a failure pattern. More like the need for the project sponsors to reconsider their brief to the team. Of course, it’s not a success pattern either. Though I’d say the team was successful in identifying and moving forward with ‘good ideas’ – up to the point where those ideas were given a red light.
Then again, The Economist might say that if the ideas had really been ‘good enough’ then they would have gone ahead with them.
In any case, those were my grounds for thinking that your description was unfair. But, in the end, whether you label Red Stripe a success or a failure probably depends on the point you want to make. Which is true of most of the judgement labels we apply to almost anything.
Andrew – thanks for the update. Clearly Red Stripe was a “mitigated failure” – it’s not exactly within their control whether senior management decided to pursue the project, and we have exactly the same problem in the humanitarian sector. Your book is on my wish list at Amazon, so hopefully I’ll learn more…
Just FYI – I did follow the discussions around Lughenjo (for obvious professional reasons), but was never convinced that it would work. It seemed to rest on the assumption that what NGOs say in meetings and what they’re actually able and willing to follow up on are the same thing