becoming whale

Stewart: 'There was a problem with us not being able to pick an outcome.'

Herman Melville's Moby-Dick 'is not like the little cat or dog owned by an elderly woman who honors and cherishes it'. He is no ordinary whale. In the same vein, Project Red Stripe's big idea, whatever it was to be, was not like the kind of idea that you have in the bath.

Of course, it could have been an idea that you have in the bath. But it wasn't, because it quickly acquired a weight and a symbolism and a significance that transformed it into something quite other. So that having it in the bath would have been as improbable as having Moby-Dick in the bath.

Moby-Dick was no ordinary whale but one that 'bypasse[d] the pack or the school'; less an animal than an event in its own right and one whose character and fleshiness are partly an emergent property of Ahab's relationship with the whale. Another emergent property (or side-effect as we used to say) of that relationship was that the captain ceased to be just Ahab. Choosing to hunt Moby-Dick 'in a choosing that exceeds him and comes from elsewhere', Ahab is eventually overtaken by his preoccupation with the beast. He can be seen as 'becoming-whale'. So Red Stripe's idea, whatever it was to be, was no ordinary idea. And the team can be seen as becoming-idea.

Taking the notion of Ahab-becoming-whale one step further, we could also imagine that, in the course of Ahab's struggle with it, the whale somehow changes. Perhaps Moby-Dick is himself becoming-more-than-whale. He is becoming-Ahab. So the idea can be seen as becoming-the-team.

In any case, a sense of the idea (though not the idea itself) was there in Mike Seery's head nine months before the project began when he proposed an internal innovation team to the Internet Strategy Group, of which he was a member.

Though he tried to talk it away - 'the key measure of success is not the idea itself, but that The Economist Group wants to run this innovation process again' - it continued to preoccupy him. The idea of an idea. 'It should be something that we couldn't otherwise have come up with.' It also preoccupied the team from the outset. Where would they find it? Would they know it when they saw it? Would they catch it? Would they be good enough for it? Would it be good enough for them? Would it be cool enough? Would they deserve it? If they found it, would other people recognise it? Would someone else steal it once they'd found it?

As Mike said later about the idea-gathering process:

...by the time each team member had read through all of the ideas and the
rush of new submissions had turned into a trickle, we knew that we still lacked
the big idea. And we were already nearly two months into the project.

To me it seems that this whale-of-an-idea was sometimes too much for the team. Too much for any team. They tried to bring it back down to size by playing with it: 'Let's divert the Thames through Lichfield', 'Let's make the world square'. But still it became the elephant in the room, to mix gargantuan mammal metaphors. And the team found themselves becoming-whale-of-an-idea-in-the-room. Then they had two ideas. Which one should they choose? Had they chosen the right idea? Then the idea was altered. Was it still good enough? Then it was changed altogether. As time ran out there was an awful dread that they had missed their chance. And, from the moment that they decided to look externally for their idea, there was a pervading sense that the idea lived 'out there'. Which meant, in turn, that the team would not be the authors or creators or owners of the idea.

In the end, it's a serious responsibility being invited to change the world. The whale-of-an-idea is an onerous beastie, and cetanthropy is an onerous business.

Dilemmas:

'Thinking big' is obviously necessary for a major innovation project, especially as it's notoriously difficult to get people to think beyond the confines of their current reality. But giving people the freedom to try and change the world may leave them a little dazed by the enormity of what they might be able to achieve.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Credits:
Wordle: www.wordle.net
Moby-Dick: Barnes & Noble
Square World: Funny Stuff Is All Around
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

creativity and innovation

Joanna: 'There's this idea that you can only create great ideas in a free-form, unstructured environment. I don't believe that.'

In Creativity is Not Enough, Professor Ted Levitt (who later became editor of the Harvard Business Review and popularised the term 'globalisation') said interesting things about creativity and innovation:

It is alleged that everything in American business would be just dandy if
industry were simply more creative and if it would hire more creative people and
give them the chance to show their fructifying stuff.

It seems to me that the world would be a better place if more Harvard Professors used terms like 'fructifying stuff' and my fantasy is that, of the two terms, he'd rather be famous for that than globalisation.

Levitt goes on to explain his view that:

...there is really very little shortage of creativity and of creative people
in American business. The major problem is that so-called creative people often
(though certainly not always) pass off on others the responsibility for getting
down to brass tacks. They have plenty of ideas but little businesslike
follow-through. They do not make the right kind of effort to help their ideas
get a hearing and a try.

His point, clearly enough, is that ideation in businesses is relatively abundant. It is its implementation that is more scarce. Which brings us back to one of the conventional distinctions made by people who attempt to define innovation and creativity: namely that creativity is about having the idea, while innovation is about making it happen.

In this sense, Red Stripe had the perfect brief. It had not only to have the big idea or ideas, it had to 'pick one or more of these ideas to develop, and then bring the idea(s) to market'.

Another point made by Levitt in the same article, is that 'in most business organisations, the most continually creative men... are also generally known as corporate malcontents.' For whatever reason (Mike Seery says the team members were chosen 'for their flexibility, enthusiasm and to get a range of experience within the team'), the Red Stripe team members were far from corporate malcontents. Of course, they were not all unreserved admirers of their employer but, by and large, they liked and respected The Economist, were proud to work for it and determined to do well by it during the six months of the project. Perhaps, if the team really had been capable, as Slashdot suggested, of frittering away the six months on drink and debauchery, then they might also have been even more receptive to even more revolutionary thinking:

In the first week, the staffers bought beer, wine, whisky, condoms, flat
screen televisions and gaming consoles.

In the second week, the staffers hired a young graphic artist through the internet for $35 per hour to set up a rudimentary web page asking for innovative ideas.

The next 5 months is a blur.

The final two weeks were a flurry of activities. So many good ideas to review! So little time!

By contrast, it was their respect for The Economist Group and concern not to do anything that might damage its reputation (or concern for their jobs, or conservatism, or pragmatism... call it what you like) that led them to back off from their brief at times. When they could have gone public with the Lughenjo idea and effectively forced the hand of The Economist Group (who would not have wanted to be seen ditching an admirably philanthropic scheme), they deliberately chose to stay silent and seek approval from the GMC first.

Staying with Ted Levitt, he further noted:

There is some evidence that the relatively rigid organisation can build into
its own structure certain flexibilities which would provide an organisational
home for the creative but irresponsible individual. What may be required,
especially in the large organisation, is not so much a suggestion box scheme as
a specialised group whose function is to receive ideas, work them out, and
follow them through in the necessary manner.

One of the bravest decisions that Project Red Stripe took in its early days was to abandon the great ideas that most of its members had brought with them and, in some cases, which they had worked up into virtual business plans in order to get accepted onto the team. (Joanna didn't have an idea at the outset and, as a result, felt somewhat split off from those who were 'awash with them'.) After presenting their ideas to each other on a cold day in Regent's Park, the team set about finding ways to harvest ideas from Economist readers and other interested parties. In using this crowdsourcing approach, they defied James Surowiecki, the granddaddy of crowd stuff, who claims - in the words of Dave Pollard - that 'despite compelling evidence that executives and experts are poor at making decisions, and that the collective wisdom of large numbers of people is very much better at it, few businesses rigorously canvass their employees and customers for anything more than inconsequential assessments after the decisions have already been made.'

For the first few weeks they simply worked on developing a workable scheme for collecting, collating, sorting, classifying and evaluating these ideas.

As a result they put themselves at a stroke in exactly the position of the 'responsible' evaluation group rather than that of the 'irresponsible' creative individual.

One reason this was such a bold decision was that it effectively undermined one of the most significant 'glues' that the team started out with - the notion that they could come up with an idea that would change the face of business, or the world, or - at the very least - The Economist.

In doing so, they freed themselves temporarily from the clutch of the becoming-whale-of-an-idea.

Dilemmas:

If good ideas are relatively abundant but the ability to commercialise them is relatively scarce, it may be useful to focus on the latter. But, if you do that, you might end up missing out on the really good idea, which no-one has had yet.

The crowd will come up with good ideas but it may also be tainted by lowest-common-denominator thinking.

A less responsible (or more malcontent) bunch than the Project Red Stripe team might have pursued the idea of a philanthropy website and launched it in a blaze of publicity without approval from the GMC. The Economist Group would have got 'businesslike follow-through' but would also have got an innovation it didn't want.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Credits:

Innovation depot: Chris Denbow

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

inspiration

Stewart (after talking on Skype to Steven's friend I Shuen, a web designer, in China): 'She's really nice.'
Steven: 'She's married.'
Mike: 'Are we actually sourcing this in China? That's fantastic. I only picked Steven for that.'

On a bright afternoon in early March I sat in the Red Stripe office. There were only three members of the team there. (Often two of them would go downstairs to the canteen to talk without disturbing the others and sometimes Ludwig would have a long, but working, weekend in Berlin with his family.)

There was a general sense of absorption but not urgency. It struck me as remarkable just how much can be done without leaving a computer. So much, in fact, that I think we sometimes forget that there is still work that can't be done in front of a computer. It was more noticeable to me as I was always without a computer, writing with a pen on a piece of paper.

Stewart's main excitement that afternoon was a conversation on Skype with a designer in China. It sounded, apparently, as if she were in the same room. He was momentarily incensed, whilst reflecting on the conversation, that we accept such poor quality telephony as natural. But he's young and doesn't remember when STD meant Subscriber Trunk Dialling or the postmistress in Kinlochspelvie who used to listen in to every call to that end of the Isle of Mull.

That lunchtime and that afternoon a serious question was crystallising about the process. These fine minds had, between them, come up with a process that allowed little room for their intuition or their imagination or their creativity. They recognised this. Joanna noddingly reported a conversation with Tom, in which he had identified that they were just 'funnelling and analysing' without any real creative input.

They were using vox pop - more properly, crowdsourcing - to look for ideas. The team had been divided down the middle about whether this was a good idea and had, in the end, decided to try crowdsourcing not out of laziness or fear of not being creative enough themselves, but because, in Business 2.0, that's what you ought to do. It was also an opportunity to work together and get to know each other as a team on a demanding and time-sensitive exercise - a kind of dummy run for the whole project. As Mike said in his final report:

Some people had thought that our public call for ideas would yield the killer idea. Others thought that they had it already. And the rest thought that a decent dose of inspirational brainstorming would be needed.

What, I wondered, were the odds of the interested world at large coming up with a better idea than the six of them locked in a room brainstorming, discussing and sharing ideas? In any case, I was now watching the team designing a form and a process for collecting and evaluating other people's ideas. I still wondered if they didn't fully trust themselves. Could a babushka have persuaded them to trust themselves? Of course, it's more of a personal gamble if they rely on their own ideas rather than on the collective wisdom of Economist readers. If the latter don't come up with the goods, then how could the team have been expected to do any better themselves? But, then again, the average Economist reader probably gave the question five minutes' thought before writing a reply. (Actually, the average Economist reader didn't reply at all.)

The implications were surely significant - remembering that one of Mike's stated intentions was to come up with a process that the Economist Group could replicate. There's now no way of knowing whether the team could have done as well or better on their own. I also wonder what would have happened if one of the team had come up with an idea so shockingly inventive and so devilishly ingenious that the rest of the team had all gasped, with one voice, 'Let's do it.'

Much the same questions were raised when the team started looking at how to evaluate the ideas that they would receive. Tom was responsible for working out a process for doing this and, one day, wearing a yellow tee-shirt, he went round the room discussing his thoughts so far with each member of the team individually. (He tended to do this more than the others, who were more inclined to call a brief meeting of the whole team.)

Coming to Joanna, I heard her ask him, 'Do we go for ideas that excite everybody, or do we group them to see that 50% are to do with timeliness or world peace?' Tom answered saying he felt they would group them, do more research, do a presentation on each main idea group and ask a list of standard questions, like 'how disruptive is this technology?' and 'how do people do it now?'. He felt that each presentation should be made to the group as a whole, which would then split into sub-groups of two to discuss the presentation, before reassembling for further discussion.

At the end of their discussion Joanna asked, 'Is that some help? Is that the kind of feedback you need?' (I only once heard anyone else say such a thing.) Was her question the product of a dominant feeling function [Myers-Briggs]? Of her being the only woman? Of her lack of assurance about her technical knowledge? Of her sophisticated teamworking skills?

In the end, unsurprisingly, they were less scientific than Tom had imagined at the outset and the issue became one of finding an idea that all the team members could get behind wholeheartedly. For that they needed Javier's help.

Dilemmas:

What are the odds of the interested world at large coming up with a better idea than a small group of fine minds brainstorming, discussing and sharing ideas and purposefully dedicated to finding the best one?

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Credits:
Loch Buie photo: Seaview Bed & Breakfast, Isle of Mull

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

those ideas in full

Regent's Park, 5th February 2007

Here are the ideas the team shared at the very start in a meeting mentioned in maps:

Steve's presentation was not so much a thought-out idea as a gathering of thoughts. Many Economist readers, he supposed, would have sent a letter to the editor and would have moved from being communication Luddites to being heavy Internet users, but probably wouldn't download a podcast.

Were there any low-hanging fruits, perhaps an 'online weekend companion', perhaps a sort of digital Intelligent Life (The Economist's 'engaging lifestyle magazine')? Perhaps there were synergies to be derived from combining data from The Economist's 'World In' and 'Cities' Guide', with local community information and blogs? Perhaps a way could also be found to secure weekend advertising through a new service like this?

Subsequent discussion focused on covering leisure, presenting advertising in a more relaxed environment and easing the transition into the digital life.

Tom used chairs to display his hand-written posters (PowerPoint happily wasn't possible in the park). Influenced in particular by Netvibes' web content aggregator and personalised portal service and the way in which he consumed the web, he presumed that this kind of behaviour would become more widespread.

He proposed an 'Economist Reader' homepage service, which would combine comments by magazine readers on Economist articles, a bookmark feature (like de.licio.us) to enable users to find out what other Economist readers are looking at on the web, a community-based service echoing digg pages for citizen journalists, an 'Economist Sandbox' (a little like the Wikipedia Sandbox) in which readers could play with Economist data and repackage them and a profile page where users could put up their CV Facebook-style.

There was much discussion of The Economist's intelligent readership, how much it has to say and how much readers have to offer each other.

Stewart's proposal didn't specifically relate to The Economist Group and was much more broad-brush in its approach. It took as its starting point the idea that the Internet is about communication rather than information. Why not, he asked, let people create interest groups and subscriptions within given geographical areas, helping to find local services, a football team or somebody to have a date with? Economist readers want to meet other Economist readers, and a service like this could be combined with geolocation technology.

Discussion centred around existing services like twitter and the more business-orientated linked in and why they were more popular in Asia than in Europe.

Joanna's proposal tended to ask questions rather than offer solutions. Before coming up with ideas of what to do, she felt the team should ask things like:

• What do people need?
• Should they try to do something for a lot of people or only for a specific group?
• What can The Economist Group do to fulfil people's fundamental needs?

Everyone agreed that this was an important corrective to the previous discussion they'd been having.

Ludwig's idea, as you'll have guessed, was 'Economist.kids'. He proposed using The Economist's data, skills, resources, reputation and values to create an Economist-like service aimed at a much younger audience. It could include a moderated Wiki, advise on job seeking, writing and all aspects of learning as well as offering financial and political information and news.

Much of the discussion was around how to commercialise this service without alienating the target audience.

It was very early on and Mike, in leader/facilitator role, didn't bring a proposal to the park.

Following these ideas through the project, you'll have noticed that Ludwig's Economist.kids proposal made it through to the last two in April, largely due to its author's enthusiasm for the project. Or, as his Myers-Briggs profile said: 'May appear so unyielding that others are afraid to approach or challenge them.'

When the Bavaria/Lughenjo idea emerged, centring on universal primary education and a broader philanthropy exchange, it had no real roots in any of the above ideas (except that Intelligent Life has a strong philanthropy theme), although it was the result of returning to Joanna's 'what do people need?' approach. But the final HiSpace social/knowledge network proposal had obvious roots in Tom's idea and in some of the discussions they'd had in the park in early February.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Credits:

T-shirt: cafepress.com
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

open innovation

Dr Henry Chesbrough had a good idea about innovation and wrote a book about it. In fact, the idea was so good that he wrote three books, several articles and launched a website about it. Along the way he interviewed hundreds of people who confirmed his hypothesis that there are two sorts of innovation: open innovation and closed innovation. These can be given capital letters thus: Open Innovation and Closed Innovation. Both can also be followed with the word paradigm, for good measure.

To save time, I'll use his own summary of the Open Innovation paradigm:

Open Innovation is the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate internal innovation, and expand the markets for external use of innovation, respectively. [This paradigm] assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as they look to advance their technology.

Dr Chesbrough's idea is described as 'pathbreaking' on the jacket of his book, where several wise people are quoted fulsomely endorsing his idea. Scott Cook, Chairman of the Intuit Executive Committee, goes so far as to say that the book is both seminal and practical and 'provides the how-to for revving up your innovation engine for leaps of profitable growth'. I'm hopeful, confident even, that no-one will describe the present book/blog/Brain in that way.

On the strength of all this, I bought the book and read it on the train back from a birthday party in Oxford. At the party, important people like Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair, Professor Robin Grove-White (former head of Greenpeace UK and Director of the CPRE) and Professor Richard Macrory, who was appointed by the UK Cabinet Office to lead a review on regulatory sanctions, talked about important things. I thought 'this is the sort of place where change begins really'. Surely it has to be as much about people as paradigms?

Anyway, in the Closed Innovation paradigm, a company uses insiders to have ideas, some of which it develops and commercialises in-house, using the profits partly to fund further research and idea-generation in-house. In the Open Innovation paradigm, in case your attention drifted during the bit about purposive inflows, the same company gets ideas from wherever it can and takes them to market through a combination of internal and external channels.

Red Stripe used a combination of both paradigms: insiders drew ideas in from outside, but then had their own idea, which they discussed widely with outsiders, before setting about commercialising it internally. It could, of course, have done any of those things differently. I don't have a view on whether it should have (though Dr Chesbrough does). I just think that innovation teams may find it useful to think carefully about this question at the outset.


Mike Seery's own conclusion was similar:

Some people had thought that our public call for ideas would yield the
killer idea. Others thought that they had it already. And the rest thought that
a decent dose of inspirational brainstorming would be needed.

Learning by doing ~ learning while waiting

But another thought in Dr Chesbrough's book caught my attention. In the foreword, John Seely Brown talks about two sources of learning: learning by doing and learning while waiting. John Seely Brown clearly likes this idea too, because he's put the whole of his foreword on his website, which is indicative of the closed loops in which this kind of discussion takes place. But it's another revealing thought for an innovation team. Certainly the Red Stripe team found and had ideas while they were waiting to decide which idea to take to market and while they were soliciting ideas from outside. But their Bavaria/Lughenjo idea evolved considerably in the course of 'doing' the business plan, talking to partners and getting ready to make their formal presentation to the GMC. It's from this 'doing' process that the final HiSpace idea emerged.

I think it's fair to say that some of the ideas that emerged from doing were more practical and practicable than many of those that emerged from the earlier waiting process. So, there's perhaps a case to be made for 'doing something', even at the outset, because it may reveal ideas of a different order.

Once again we can view the Red Stripe approach as a combination of the two. But the outcry (scroll down when you get there) that greeted their decision not to publish the ideas that were submitted by outsiders (and which was generally speaking based on an objection to a private company soliciting money-making ideas and then keeping them to itself) may have concealed a more important issue - namely that if they had allowed the 'world' to kick around and discuss the ideas that were submitted, they might have found that much of the process of evaluation, sifting, analysis and development of those ideas could have been done for them by people who, collectively, knew more about their viability than the Red Stripe team ever could.

But then, of course, the problem remains that Red Stripe would never have actually owned any of the ideas.

The Delphi Technique

While we're on the subject of learning while doing and the team's conversations with NGOs and other experts who were likely to be involved in the Lughenjo idea, I should mention the Delphi technique. I was alerted to it by a Harvard Business Review article called The Wisdom of (Expert) Crowds by Robert Duboff. The technique, which is not unrelated to scenario planning, is rather like an amplified focus group. You recruit two dozen or so experts on a particular topic and ask them to evaluate possible developments/trends/outcomes in a chosen business or technology area. (There's a lot more to it than that - an independent facilitator then summarises their thoughts and they have another round. And so on. There are lots of rules, which necessitate the hiring of expensive consultants to oversee the process.) I suppose it's also related to the Prediction Markets idea, which the Red Stripe team had discussed at the outset and were encouraged to pursue during their idea harvesting process.

As I've said elsewhere, involving the experts eventually led Red Stripe to reject Lughenjo and it's possible that the earlier, formal involvement of such a group might have helped them home in on a workable idea. But, of course, that would require that they had first decided which mountain they were going to climb. For sure, Red Stripe were in the lucky position, as an Economist team, of being able to get the attention of experts whom others might have found it more difficult to talk to.

Cathedral and bazaar

Before we leave the Open Innovation paradigm, I'd like to mention another way of thinking about all this that's been around a lot longer. In 1997, Eric Raymond, talking about the open source software movement, came up with the term 'the cathedral and the bazaar', which is constantly evolving into a book. The former represented the conventional method of using a group of experts to design and develop a piece of software (though it could apply to almost any large-scale creative or innovative work). The bazaar represented the open source approach. This idea has been amplified by a lot of people, notably Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams in their book Wikinomics and on their website and blog of the same name. Wikinomics, being the commercialised arm of The Wisdom of Crowds, of course has its opponents and detractors. It's not a panacea and plenty has been written about the foolishness of crowds. Bruce Schneier's essay on the psychology of security is one elegant example of this. But Eric Raymond himself is also quoted in a compelling article by Nicholas Carr as saying that 'one cannot code from the ground up in bazaar style. One can test, debug, and improve in bazaar style, but it would be very hard to originate a project in bazaar mode.' In the same vein, Raymond is also quoted as saying, 'The individual wizard is where successful bazaar projects generally start'.

Project Red Stripe had six fine individual wizards, unsure of how far to trust their own wizardry and how far to turn to the wisdom of the crowd.

Dilemmas

Open vs. Closed. You can use insiders or outsiders; your own ideas or other people's; your own money or other people's. With the latter, there's always going to be less ownership and less control. But more room.

Thinking vs. Doing. Trying to implement one idea may inspire other ideas, but settling on an idea too soon may close down other options. Time-tabling is important.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Credits:

Paradigm bottle: Michael Calore

Innovation Camp: Theis Kofoed Hjorth

Innovation mosaic: Roland Tanglao

Delphi: Jay Galvin

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

still in beta

I mentioned Bruce Schneier's article on the psychology of security in Open Innovation. On the face of it, our general inability to make sense of the modern world shouldn't have much to do with Project Red Stripe. But it does.

Schneier identifies the different financial accounts that we keep in mind when performing different trade-off calculations. For example, cinema-goers who had previously bought a $10 ticket were asked whether they would buy a replacement ticket if they found they had lost the first. 46% would. A comparable group who were on the way to the cinema but had not yet bought a ticket, were asked if they would still buy a ticket if they opened their wallets to find that they had lost a $10 note. 88% would.

DIVERSION: On flossing, gay sex and the rapture

[Schneier's wonderful Crypto-Gram Newsletter also drew my attention to those fine people at You've Been Left Behind. As Bruce says, it's easy to laugh at the You've Been Left Behind site, which purports to send automatic e-mails to your friends after the Rapture. And, as Reader's Digest used to say, laughter is the best medicine. But there's a business opportunity there, surely. What about people's freezers? After the Rapture they'll need emptying. Other people could take rapturees' clothes to jumble sales or arrange for Palestinian refugees to live in their unneeded homes.]

Talking to the Red Stripe team over lunch one day (about the selection of a 'good cause' for the eventual project), we compared the press coverage given to one death in a train crash with that given to any of the 140 or so children killed in road accidents in the UK each year. Our view of good causes - AIDS orphans, famine victims, maltreated pets, etc. - is also notoriously subject to perceptual bias.

Returning to Schneier's article, he quotes the following words from Daniel Gilbert's exquisitely headlined article, If only gay sex caused global warming. Gilbert nicely explains why the human brain is so poorly equipped to make reliable decisions when assessing different risks:

The brain is a beautifully engineered get-out-of-the-way machine that constantly scans the environment for things out of whose way it should right now get.

That's what brains did for several hundred million years-and then, just a few million years ago, the mammalian brain learned a new trick: to predict the timing and location of dangers before they actually happened.

Our ability to duck that which is not yet coming is one of the brain's most stunning innovations, and we wouldn't have dental floss or 401(k) plans without it. But this innovation is in the early stages of development. The application that allows us to respond to visible baseballs is ancient and reliable, but the add-on utility that allows us to respond to threats that loom in an unseen future is still in beta testing.

All of this by way of a preamble to Red Stripe's deliberations over a target group or 'market' for their business. Where relatively simple 'interest' equations were involved in deciding what kind of Internet business would be most worth pursuing, far more complex equations became necessary when debating the relative worth of plans to offer better education to children in the third world (the most needy), to children in the first world (the most influential decision-makers of the future), to women (mothers of the poorly educated children), etc.

While the team actively solicited ideas about what they should do, they did not solicit ideas about the group(s) for whom they should implement those ideas. Should they have invited an archbishop, an aid worker, a genetic researcher and others to pitch for a particular target market? I doubt it. But, for me, there was a noticeable change of temperature when I first heard Joanna insisting to the group that they should stop discussing their ideas in a vacuum and consider whom they would benefit and how.

I had felt the same myself when she said to me early in March that she was determined to ensure that whatever idea was pursued was grounded in a real need felt by The Economist community which, she said, would make it sustainable. She said that the others would have to justify the idea to her and, in so doing, sounded clear and sure of herself. Though, afterwards, she observed that saying that sounded a bit grandiose or arrogant, because the others were all clever people.

In any case, it's possible to end up with a market that you cannot hope to serve, or an idea that nobody wants. Or, as Mike reports David Laird saying to the team at one stage, 'although there may be a gap in the market, the key is whether there's a market in the gap.'

Dilemmas:

A deserving market may be motivational, even inspirational. But it doesn't necessarily make for good business - as we can deduce from observing the investment priorities of big pharma. How do you value a commercial priority against an ethical one in business?

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Credits:
Rapture poster: Electrorash
Dental floss: Annie Oakley
Big Farmer: Waymarking.com
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------