Accident or Innovation? It Depends.

At a time when everyone is doubling down to find new ways to engage audiences and grow revenues, it's good to remember that some of the biggest innovations in history were either accidents, or discovered while working on something completely different.

Robert Austin, Lee Devin and Erin Sullivan of The Wall Street Journal interviewed innovators in fields from manufacturing and fine art and came up with these recommendations for how to encourage accidents that may lead to future innovations. Their prescription includes periodically mixing things up between seemingly unrelated projects, making experimentation (and resulting accidents) cheaper, and my favorite, encouraging people to collect what appears to be random junk if they find it interesting.

If something interests you, they say, squirrel it away into your messy filing cabinet of random ideas and periodically stumble through it. You never know when it may pop into your mind at the right moment, and even change the world. We all owe a debt of gratitude to Edward Jenner, who remembered a milkmaid telling him that she would never get smallpox because she had cowpox. That simple idea lead him to discover a vaccine for smallpox.

innovation

How Technology Agnosticism Fuels Innovation

Steve Yelvington has an amusing post today titled "Dan Drinks the Kool-Aid," a reference to my decision to build our Printcasting tools on the Drupal framework. In the inside-baseball game that is the blogosphere, there's a story behind this that I think other media innovators can learn from, and in my opinion it's all about how important keeping an open mind is to building a culture of innovation.

Ever since the Californian started experimenting with social media after the launch of The Northwest Voice and Bakotopia, we've stayed in close contact with Yelvington and his team at Morris Communications. Very early on, people at both companies noticed that we had similar ideas and approaches to engaging audiences. The differences between the consumer experiences on the Voice, Bakotopia.com and Morris' Blufftontoday.com are very slight.

But there are some very large differences in our back-end technical approaches. Very early on, Yelvington's team started building its social media sites on the open-source Drupal platform. The Californian started its sites first with a vendor, and then partly out of the frustration of that experience, moved in the other direction and began building our own stuff.

There are some good reasons behind this. Compared to Morris, which has 13 daily newspapers, 33 radio stations and magazines in multiple states, the Californian is tiny. When my boss Mary Lou Fulton started the Voice, the Californian didn't have a single software programmer or system administrator on staff. Our complete lack of dedicated technical support staff made modifying an open-source tool difficult. We couldn't do anything on our own and had to rely on vendors and outside contractors to guide many of our decisions.

When I started in 2004, before the Californian had any niche products or technology to speak of, I wasn't satisfied with using vendors and I started playing around with various open source tools. We launched Bakotopia on an open-source platform called Noah's Classifieds. It was a great one-trick-pony platform for simple Craigslist-list style listings, but we wanted to do a lot more than that. In the end we saw that it had to be modified so much that we faced two choices: build a bunch of new functionality around a core to make it do something it wasn't designed to do, or spend an extra month building a new core that was a better fit for our long-term needs.

Before investing in a fully custom solution, we looked at other open-source tools, including Drupal. I liked the way it was structured, but found that it had stability issues and just wasn't all there yet (I used it on my blog for a good 4 months before it crashed and took all of my postings with it). The Californian couldn't wait for the perfect open-source solution to emerge and I didn't want to risk staking the future of this 140-year-old media company on a promising, but at the time still adolescent, technology.

So we started "rolling our own" and, to our amazement, ended up with the award-winning Bakomatic platform. That was the right thing to do at the time, and we will continue to use and enhance the system. It still has some unique functionality and experiences that don't exist in Drupal -- for example, the Inside Guide business directory and a Facebook-like Personal Inbox. And in some respects we can innovate faster with it because we don't have any external dependencies on other projects.

However, we don't have any strong religion about proprietary technology, or any technology for that matter. Whenever a new need comes up we think first about the end-user and specific business goals, and then see how different technology solutions meet those needs. We're technology agnostics.

Printcasting is unique for us in that it needs to work really well in Bakersfield, then be quickly adopted by partners in five other cities, and finally made available to anyone under an open-source license (read more about the three phases of the project).

Building the features on our own proprietary platform was one solution that would have required releasing some or all of our code to the open source community. We briefly considered doing that, but then realized that technology was only half of the picture. We also needed an open-source community. We decided that the project would have a bigger overall impact if it was connected to an existing open-source movement versus trying to start our own competing movement.

Four years after our initial evalutation, Drupal is well out of its adolescence and is an ideal launching pad for almost any social media tool. By making modules for the consumer-facing pieces and tying them into PDF generation on the back end (which by the way would not be done by Drupal, but the end-user will never know or care), we know that thousands of existing Drupal sites, and many more thousands to come, will experiment with what we build. Not only that, they will take what we do and make it better. That's perfectly aligned with the goals of the Knight News Challenge.

Will the Californian use Drupal for more projects? Maybe, or maybe not, depending on the project. We're also now using Ning sites as a low-cost way to serve smaller niche audiences. If they show promise, we invest more resources and move them into our larger network. If not, it's really easy to shut down a Ning site. Ning didn't even exist when we started down the path of social media. In another four years who knows what else will be out there?

Drupal is looking really good now based on our current needs, and it may continue to look good in another four years. But if there's one thing I've learned it's that innovation relies on flexibility and open-mindedness. The minute you put a stake in the ground, you're cutting off your options and your rate of innovation slows down.

One thing that has bothered me since I re-entered the newspaper industry after nearly 7 years away is how it's always looking for one silver bullet. Perhaps that's because the industry relied on one solution (the daily printed newspaper) for its entire existence up until now. But times have changed, and one solution to every problem is no longer feasible.

Innovation requires the opposite of silver-bullet thinking. It's an ever-evolving process that requires constant experimentation, evaluation and change.

Or put another way, feel free to drink someone else's Kool-Aid, but make sure you buy the variety pack. Today's Black Cherry may be tomorrow's Blue-Dini or Purplesaurus Rex.

printcasting, knight news challenge, news innovation

Richard Branson: the pragmatic optimist

There's a great interview in today's Wall Street Journal with the king of all wacky successful entrepreneurs, Virgin's Richard Branson.

As we start a new year -- and possibly a new era of optimistic change, as expressed in Thursday's Iowa Caucus surprise embrace of Washington outsiders Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee -- I think this interview contains some good reminders of how true innovators push for transformative change in both good and bad times, and always look for ways to turn seemingly intractable problems into paradigm-shifting, positive solutions. This is good for Americans, and really all world citizens, to keep in mind as we deal with a shifting economy made worse by a global credit crisis. One person's problem is another person's opportunity, and Branson is the ultimate opportunist.

I have to admit that I've been a fan of the guy ever since he showed up nearly naked in Times Square for a publicity stunt to promote Virgin Mobile. I thought, "that guy is nuts!" and I couldn't believe the leader of any major company would act that way (he regularly kite-surfs, too). So of course I had to see what he was going to do next.

Later, I watched every episode of The Rebel Billionaire reality TV show, in which Branson-like executives competed to take over his job at Virgin. They'd come up with business plans one day, then climb onto the top of an airborne hot air balloon to have tea with him the next to show that they were serious about taking risks.

Soon after that show Branson started Virgin Galactic, which plans to be the first commercial tourism venture, using the SpaceShip One spaceplane that was tested in Kern County, not far from Bakersfield. And now he's working to make his Virgin airline companies (there are three) more environmentally friendly by running on butanol instead of traditional jet fuel to improve their efficiency and reduce their impact on the environment.

Branson's embrace of environmentally friendly technologies is about more than just good will. You can tell that he's also thinking about how it can make him, and many others, lots of money. There's no way like profit to get people to jump on a bandwagon. Some other things in the interview that caught my eye:

• Necker Island, the Caribbean island that he owns and calls home, will be 100% carbon neutral in six months by using energy from windmills and the sun. And it's not all for environmental reasons. He claims it's going to save him $500,000 a year. (I've been on a boat next to that island, and I can tell you that it's really sunny and often windy, so I can see how this would make sense).
• He points to the folly of America's new official embrace of corn-based ethanol not for completely environmental reasons, but also because it's not as efficient as sugar-based ethanol, which means lower profits. He says:
  

  "Sugar-based ethanol is seven times more efficient than corn-based ethanol, so every acre of land can create seven times the volume of fuel."

  Hmm, maybe we'll all be filling our cars with "Virgin Sugary Ethanol" one day?
  
• And as the ultimate example of the glass-half-full mindset, he's already thinking about how to literally turn rising sea levels into something positive. From the interview:

  "If the sea levels are going to rise, why don't we create some massive inland lakes in Africa and Asia? Instead of having all the cities flooded all over the world, the inland lakes can help take the brunt of it. At the same time, you would have this cool water, which would help cool the earth down. The water itself would help fertilize deserts, which would then grow trees. So we're trying to think of biggish schemes that would help counter the problem."

Would that last idea even work? I have no idea, and I bet neither does he. But this is exactly the kind of brainstorming that needs to happen in times of great need and change.

As his fellow Brits would say, Branson is a bit of a "nutter," but you have to respect his relentless drive, optimism, and even pragmatism (even his craziest ideas have solid business plans, and most succeed). Underneath his 1980s-esque hard rock / "stoner" look, there are signs of someone who can see into the future like nobody else simply because he refuses to limit his thinking. And that's also why he lives on his own private island while the rest of the world wonders how to keep from going into mortgage default due to sub-prime mortgages gone bad.

Since I work for a newspaper and usually blog about things that impact media, you may be wondering why I'm going on and on about someone who runs an airline, is building a spaceport and previously ran a record company.

That right there shows the connection. Branson doesn't think about anything in terms of just one industry, but rather looks for opportunities where his company can solve problems for people in new ways -- and make a buck. As the latest example, Virgin is even trying to buy a British bank that's on the verge of insolvency thanks to bad mortgages. His justification: "In times of strife, there are certainly opportunities."

Richard Branson shows how sometimes you have to start with the "it's so crazy is just might work" type of ideas, and then work down from there, versus starting only with what you think you can accomplish with current resources. That's something that's important to any industry. At this time in the newspaper and media industries generally, we all need to be more like Richard Branson.

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