Too much violins

The ideas are pouring in to Project Red Stripe. Around 200 had arrived by last Tuesday when I visited the team – most of them, at that time, due to Red Stripe’s appearance on Slashdot. And this is only the beginning – Economist Group customers are also being invited to contribute their ideas. In fact, if there was ever any worry about getting the word out there, Project Red Stripe can surely relax: a Google search finds me 47,900 occurrences of the term (although a search of economist.com still returns me no results for the term – and thereby hangs a tale).

I keep writing about "tensions", and there’s clearly a tension involved in fishing in the murky pool that is innovation, Web 2.0 and the blogosphere. Especially if the lily pad you’re balancing on is an old world, respectable one like The Economist. To people watching from the outside, it’s an interesting – and difficult – balancing act. For every blogcry of "Way to go, Economist" there are several counterblasts of "You suck, Economist". (The principal subject of the latter being RedStripe’s decision not to make the ideas it receives public and its decision to reward the contributor(s) of any idea eventually used with a 6-month subscription to The Economist.)

To some extent this is inevitable. There are a lot of clever people out there and they don’t all want RedStripe to work. Nor do they want to play by anyone’s rules. They’re mostly rule-phobic. For example, here’s a guy whose contribution is to predict what ideas other people are going to contribute. Here’s a comment from a SlashDot reader which renders one of the sentences from RedStripe’s Terms & Conditions into Perl code. Here’s a comment from someone who doesn’t think they’re doing innovation the right way.

So, maybe more interesting is to wonder how projects like this should handle the (inevitable) adverse criticism. RedStripe have engaged a little, with a couple of blogs about this and a couple of responses to their most public critics. More would clearly be wasting their own time. Or would it? As I said in January, one of the really interesting things about the way they’re doing this is how public they’re being: website, blog, webcam, apparent transparency. They’re even publicly debating the rights and wrongs of one of the team submitting a comment to SlashDot anonymously. And you can’t go out and court publicity and then just ignore it or complain about it. Or you can, but then you get called Lady Di. So should they have allocated the job of answering their critics to one member of the team?

Perhaps, in the end, Oliver Burkeman had the answer when he wrote this in the Guardian about The Trap:

The most perceptive comment on the situation comes, in Curtis's film, from a beleaguered bus conductor, in archive footage used as a counterpoint to the visionary talk of targets and markets and freedom. It could serve as a general diagnosis of the problem of how best to approach politics, psychology, culture - the lot. "Anybody that deals with the public, you can never win," he says, flatly. "You can never win when you deal with the public. Never."

Certainly, much of the response to RedStripe’s search for ideas is underpinned by assumptions/prejudices about how an organisation like The Economist Group, or innovators like this team, or capitalists in general are likely to operate. Certainly, if you keep on telling people they’re selfish and calculating, that's how they'll behave. "We ... come to believe," as Adam Curtis says in The Trap, "that we really are the strange, isolated beings that the cold war scientists had invented to make their models work."

So, another question has to be: how can a commercial organisation like The Economist Group behave fairly in this context? How can we commercialise the lichens in your rainforest, the knowledge of your traditional medicine practitioners, the ideas of your creative artists fairly and ethically?

The answer is that you can’t. Quite. The commercialised eventually have to get savvy about exploiting their exploiters (if you frame it in that language). We have enough trouble working out how high-earning husbands can ethically draw on the resources of low- or no-income wives, and how the latter can leverage their redundancy payments when the relationship reaches full term. Or is it the other way round? We have enough trouble working out how young porn stars can commercialise their skills and assets without exploiting fat, bald, old, rich men. Or is it the other way round?

In the end, we rely on these six people to do the right thing. My guess is that they’ll do better than the board of The Economist Group (no disrespect; I don’t know them). And the board of The Economist Group will do better than the board of Halliburton. My guess, also, is that this rich seam is going to be exhausted very quickly. It reminds me of the early days of direct mail when 5% of the people you sent a mailing to would buy your product. Now it’s about 0.12%. In five years’ time, how many people will respond to this kind of solicitation for good ideas?