The Economist Magazine Looks Outside For Insight

An anonymous reader writes "All of traditional media is scrambling to remain relevant on the Net, but The Economist of London is taking it to extremes, with a skunkworks operation called Project Red Stripe. The magazine gathered six staffers from around the world, set them up in a London office, and gave them six months to come up with a radically new idea for the business. As a magazine for free markets, they figured others would have the best ideas — so are throwing open the doors for community input."

Comments

Business Model

[ChadAmberg]

Man, that rules as a business model.

I'm hired to come up with new ideas. Paid who knows how much $$. So rather than do any actual work, I'm going to let the internet schmucks do it for me! I just have to pick which ideas are best.

Man, I'm in the wrong job...

Re:Business Model

[figment]

No kidding.

I've read the Economist religiously for several years. I firmly believe it to be probably the best magazine/newspaper out there. I subscribe despite their sub price being approximately 5 times that of Times or Newsweek or any other magazine out there.

That said, this is the most stupid idea I have ever heard out of them. They actually will compensate you, with a rocking 6-mo web-subscrption to economist.com (street value: roughly $50).

Perhaps the Economist should actually talk to their economists, and ask them what 'Incentive Compatability' means. $50 for a new revolutionary business idea surely isn't incentive compatible. If I were the Economist, I'd be terribly embarassed about this.

Re:Business Model

[zippthorne]

1. You grant to The Economist Group and its designees a perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive fully-paid up and royalty free licence to use such Submission without restrictions of any kind and without any obligation of payment or other consideration of any kind, or permission or notification, to you or any third party.

Let's not ascribe more evil than necessary.

The plan so far

[wombatmobile]

The magazine gathered six staffers from around the world, set them up in a London office, and gave them six months to come up with a radically new idea for the business.

In the first week, the staffers bought beer, wine, wisky, 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!

Deal killer

[Somnus]

From their FAQ, on the subject of remuneration:

What will I get for submitting an idea?

Unfortunately, we can give no direct reward or compensation for your contribution. If, however, Project Red Stripe chooses to develop an idea you have submitted, you will receive recognition on the Project Red Stripe web site and a free six-month subscription to Economist.com.

I'm sure as hell not giving a money-making idea to the Economist Group if I'm not getting a piece of the pie. If it might save the world, maybe; if it's not money-making and helps folks, I probably would.

Never give a sucker an even break

[dsdtzero]

The knee jerk reaction to this sort of thing is that they are trying to get something for nothing on the backs of us under appreciated geniuses. I've
seen the NGASAEB W.C. Fields quote in The Economist many times so this mindset may actually exist in thier mission statement somewhere. However,
I have a list of ideas in my head that I would like to see happen but know I will never make them happen. Ideas--even really good ones--are cheap. The hard
part is making them happen. If they can extract something useful from the minds of the creative but uninitiated, bully for them.

N.b.: Corporations do this all the time... Consider the pharmaceutical industry. Without the research that they get for free in the form of research
articles that are in large part paid for by taxpayers the pharma companies would have to do WAY more R&D than they have ever done or will ever do.

Model

[Mark_MF-WN]

This seems doomed to failure. You think comittee thinking is bad? Imagine a comittee of tens of thousands or more. Filtering good ideas out of the gibberish would be a gargantuan undertaking -- probably one that is more difficult than just thinking up your own ideas. Didn't the article say that they got some of the best minds in the business? So why would those great minds turn to a few thousand sub-mediocre minds? Given the choice, I'll take half a dozen smart people locked in a room with a whiteboard and an espresso machine over ten thousand jackasses making decisions by mob thinking.

It's interesting how in every modern war, the government that wins (assuming there is anything even vaguely like a winner) invariably puts a very small group of top military minds in charge of the war effort, even to the point of managing relevant aspects of the economy. Losers do just the opposite -- they let their legislature, congress, senate, president, chairman, corporate interests, beauracrats, and cronies make war decisions. And naturally, they either make retarded decisions or they rob the public blind at the expense of the war effort.

Comittee thinking is a disease. The bigger the comittee, the worse it gets. Human collaborative efficiency for creative works tops out at around 4 or 5 people. If you hope to invent new paradigms, you'll be hard-pressed to accomplish it with even as many a three people, and even two is pushing it.

Re:Model

[Mark_MF-WN]

Democracy is a horrible form of government. Can you point out even a single example of a democratic state that doesn't operate in a state of complete and utter lunacy?

The problem with Vietnam and Iraq is precisely the fact that they were run by committee. Congress got to periodically hamstring the war effort, senators got to earmark funds for projects that did nothing more than keep useless people employed, generals couldn't agree on how to wage the war and were going in a dozen directions at once. In Vietnam, the government couldn't even agree to have the goddam basic courage to admit that they were waging war and not a "police action". In Iraq, there isn't even any clear military leadership -- Bush is such a complete and utter retard that he puts civilian and corporate leaders in charge of a military effort and lets them completely ignore the actual military experts.

Your confusion stems from the fact that you assume that ANY handful of people will be equivalent. I'm talking about a handful of COMPETENT people.

How do you find the five best ideas in a hail of "advice" from 10,000 people? You can't -- it's molecules of gold in a river. Valuable in theory, completley worthless in practice, because it's unrecoverable.

The only thing democracies have going for them is that they can assign power to where it's most usefully employed -- small groups of experts that are close to the problem domain. Committees are only marginally better than small groups of idiots. Despotic governments routinely outperform democracies. That's the main reason that communist governments are so good at waging war. It's just that there's no way to ensure that despotic governments remain competent, or to replace them once they lose their way. That's the main reason that communist governments are so BAD at running their economies in the long-term. Democracies have the flexibility to go both ways -- to operate despotically when necessary, and to revert to the nice, safe, lowest-common-denominator shittiness of committee thinking the rest of the time.

Re:Model

[Antity-H]

Filtering good ideas out of the gibberish would be a gargantuan undertaking -- probably one that is more difficult than just thinking up your own ideas

What if the garguatuan dataset was the filtered through a community process ? like everyone can submit ideas and everyone can vote for the ideas they like best ? :)

And What's to Bet....

[darkonc]

That, if they get a useful idea from the public, that they patent it (at least, in the US, where business method patents are allowed).

Re:Hint #1 - lose the "Web 2.0" crap.

[Mard]

Wow, you have no idea what you're talking about. Nice work!

I'll qualify this troll-like statement by pointing out that The Economist IS IN THE BUSINESS OF MAKING CONTENT. Take a look at their website, since you've obviously never even heard of the little magazine they run that puts Newsweek and Time to shame, and you'll realize how uninformed your comment is: http://www.economist.com/index.html