Sage advice from Steve Yelvington:
The guys from Innosight often advise us to separate innovative projects from the mothership. And they have a simple prescription: Be patient for scale, but impatient for profit. You need to discover whether a project makes business sense (i.e., can generate some sort of a profit) before you try to make it big.
Inside a newspaper, though, the drive is to make it big first, and hope for profit later. This can lead to big mistakes. A mistake is not always a bad thing, but you learn most quickly (with the least suffering) from a series of small mistakes.
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COMMENTS / 3 COMMENTS
andrew thought this on Sep 23 06 at 12:05 amI guess it also depends on what your end goal is for innovating. Is everything always motivated by profit alone?
An honest Man thought this on Sep 23 06 at 5:20 pmHow can innovative research be funded without profit?
Neil McIntosh thought this on Sep 23 06 at 5:52 pmAndrew - never motivated by profit alone, but (as honest man is saing) generally you won’t get to innovate often without profit from your ventures. And the newspaper business is, at the moment, in bad need of profitable innovation as it looks to move itself online.
Some definitions of innovation, indeed, actually see successful innovation as bringing a new product to a market profitably. (Profit is not a requirement for invention, of course, but that’s a different thing).
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