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.