08/07/07

How big publishing companies should innovate.

If you work for a big publishing company, and want to find ways to innovate, then read this article from the Press Gazette. Now. [Link via BookTwo]

As we know, (book) publishing is desperate to find successful new commercial models online. But how many publishers are really innovating? And if they are, how many are set up operationally, psychologically, and on a human resources level, to behave like a web company? How many people work in publishing - at a high enough level - that can create a culture and department of fresh-minded, independently-spirited and entrepreneurially driven young publishers? Whilst simultaneously accelerating into the ever-diminishing space of bookselling?

Of course we all know individual people in many publishing houses who are doing some fantastic projects - but the problem is that their enthusiasm isn’t shared, or possibly even understood, by the rest of the company. Or, indeed, you have other companies who have grasped the digital nettle, but the corporate structures, policies and bureaucracy are anathema to innovation. (We all know the stories if multiple companies where the firewall blocks Second Life, for example.) It must be a frustrating experience.

And this is why the above article resonated with me. The core arguments - read the extract about TheEconomist.com - are that big companies should invest in people to go off for a short, intense period of time on a very long leash, with the remit to develop some stuff with the company’s IP that may deliver a return in the future. See here:

As publishers begin to think more carefully about how to manage their efforts to innovate online in the face of nimbler upstart competitors, several are consciously adopting the Skunk Works [agile development] approach.

Thirteen weeks after starting work in the spare bedroom, Project Badger’s first project will launch next week. The site, KnowYourMobile, will help users learn to use the 90 per cent of their mobile phone’s features that they don’t currently use. A second site, HateYourBoss, about Britain’s worst bosses, is at an early stage of development and is pencilled in for a May launch.

When the sites achieve an audience of 100,000 unique monthly users, Project Badger will turn them over to Dennis Interactive to monetise.

“The beauty is that we don’t have to worry about selling it. We just produce websites that we’d actually like editorially,” says Toor.

There are no pitches here, no cumbersome approval process, no board meetings, and no web design by committee. The Skunk Work’s focus on rapid, lowcost delivery is a conscious inversion of the way large publishing companies launch new sites.”There’s no strict hierarchy here, we are informed by what we, as a group, think will work well, that we would want to use or read. We can make decisions quickly - there is no real interference,” says Toor.

“It’s like having a start-up. We’re trying to recreate some of the excitement and spontaneity that went into the web when it was all amateurs creating sites because they liked it, and trying to harness some of that and do it within a corporate environment. And obviously they think they can make money off it.”

that from Felix Dennis. And this from The Economist,

“The reason we’re here is that it’s a completely different vibe from The Economist offices,” says Economist Group chief information officer Mike Seery, who organised the project… At management level, says Seery, the Economist Group had become conscious that its online development was not radical enough.

“We realised that we were hardly cutting edge - in fact, we were falling behind in some things,” recalls Seery…. “and it’s hardly groundbreaking.”

“This is asking what we would have to do to have an online business the size The Economist is offline. To do that we need to innovate. And to do that we need to drop the shackles of our normal processes.”

Seery has clearly given the theory of innovation some thought. “There’s a bit of a debate about innovation - whether it’s something you do as an integral part of what everyone does every day, or whether you set up some sort of stand-alone unit to do it,” he says.

He opted for the stand-alone approach after an abortive attempt to use the everyday method with his 50-member IT team.

To run Project Red Stripe, Seery was given his pick of any six people recruited from across the Economist Group. They have a budget of £100,000 and six months to come up with something new. They have been given carte blanche to use any brand and any existing content in the Economist Group free of charge. In theory, at least, they could decide to give the Economist Intelligence Unit’s expensive research reports away for free online.

The only constraints in the extremely broad remit are that whatever they do must be radically innovative, and must be on the web.

So, for the price of a bad book advance, and some rented desk space, big brains may well come back with some good ideas.

But this isn’t enough. These ideas need to be taken on to the core of the business - without going through committee decision hell. More likely than not, smart people have been having good ideas in publishing for years, but can’t get it past IT, marketing, or the board. The executive man hours involved in nixing projects probably costs more than just knocking up a proof of concept and seeing what happens.

Publishers - please - steal these ideas and get developing! Publishing books and corporate goo stop the people with good ideas, who love publishing books, from helping to write the future of your business.

Rant over. But it was a good article. Inspiring even.

[Update: Read Jeffrey Zeldman on Why Companies Should Have Web Departments]

From law firms to libraries, from universities to Fortune 500 companies, the organization’s website almost invariably falls under the domain of the IT Department or the Marketing Department, leading to turf wars and other predictable consequences. While many good (and highly capable) people work in IT and marketing, neither area is ideally suited to craft usable websites or to encourage the blossoming of vital web communities.

Competent IT departments handle a dazzling array of technical challenges requiring deep, multi-leveled expertise. But tasks such as equipping 20,000 globally dispersed employees with appropriately configured PCs, or maintaining corporate databases and mail gateways, don’t necessarily map to the skills required to design great user experiences for the web.

Posted by Peter Collingridge in Future of the book, Publishing.