Bad Idea: Where do you start if you’re designing a corporate logo?

Ruth Kedar: The most important thing is to listen to the people who are behind the company. Then try to understand who they are, where they’re coming from, what they’re trying to achieve, and what kind of problem they’re trying to solve. And understand what the audience is.

You know in Alice Through the Looking Glass, she says ‘I need to see what I say to know what I think’? In many ways it’s my role to get them to talk to see what it is they’re saying, it gets them to articulate what the idea is.

Then take all of that and translate it into a visual representation, until you come up with something that people can really stand behind, that echoes their voice and makes it louder and brighter. If they are not thrilled with it, it doesn’t matter that I’ve created the most balanced, incredibly harmonious and beautiful imagery – the difference between art and design is that design is a utilitarian enterprise, solving a particular problem.

BI: From a layman’s perspective, it seems like the simplest logos are often the most effective. How do you create something that’s simple and yet transmits a complex message?

RK: The company and the people behind it, and the customer – they do not all need to see exactly the same thing in a logo, but if every single one of them is able to see that his perspective is being articulated in it, then that’s great. If you take this symbol, you’ve given birth to this thing, and very much like Moses, you put it on the stream and it takes it where it goes. So then you’re not controlling it any more, but if every single person who encounters it is able to see something in it that touches them deeply, and in a positive way, and it withstands the trials of time, the geographic, the generations, then it’s successful.

So you shouldn’t limit yourself to something so concrete and so recognisable, or tied into a fad or a particular time or connotation – in doing that you’re limiting the vision. If you look at the Apple logo, there are a lot of ideas that go beyond the fact that this is a fruit. There’s the connotation of the Garden of Eden, the interaction between nature and man, taking the first step, taking the bite of something much bigger.

You need to draw a visceral reaction from people, and these reactions are based on their whole experience as a human being in every kind of role they’ve ever had, as children, as friends, as parents, as lovers, as consumers, as travellers.

BI: So how did the Google logo come about?

RK: I met with people that had an amazing vision, that had an idea of where Google was going to be in ten years. With the product they were bringing forth, the interaction between the consumers and the product, how they viewed themselves as a company, and the culture within the company – they really did not want to be anything like we had seen before.

We were not going to be upper-case. And this was the time of Yahoo and Netscape – wacky fonts, which represented being anti-establishment, but because everyone was doing wacky fonts, it became the norm. I tried to find a font that was still serif, which was unusual at the time, but that wasn’t thick and bold, that had an elegance to it.

They were really into childhood, all the aspects of childhood we still feel ourselves no matter how old we get: curiosity, playfulness, optimism, adventurousness, impishness. I was thinking about Legos, and putting things together, and the colour palette, and rainbows. While we were talking and developing, we went around and around, and ended up with something that resembled some of the original things that Larry [Page, Google's co-founder] was playing with at the very beginning, but with more complexity drawn into it.

BI: The Google logo hasn’t changed for many years now – why do you think that is?

RK: It still looks very different from anything out there – with the typefaces and letterforms that were chosen, each is still unique, and allows for the doodles to be created. Again a big no-no – you shouldn’t touch the logo, and yet here is a platform that you can play with, and it’s so recognisable you can take huge chunks out of it and still see it. I think one of the great successes is the fact that when you say the word Google, you see the logo in front of you.

I’ve done other things which I think are stronger in terms of aesthetic and purity of design, but this is a good example of the company, the product and the visual identification working so well together that they have been able to grow and develop into completely different areas and still work. The flexibility and adaptability fits the Google culture. There’s something in the logo that transcends the original intent; it’s a vessel that expands, it’s a flower that blooms and grows.

There are some concerns around the fact they have so much power and they’re branching into so many different areas. It’s interesting that the fact that they still carry on with a very playful and childlike logo – in some ways it makes it easier to interact with the huge conglomerate they have become. It makes them non-sinister and non-threatening.

BI: How has the internet changed the landscape of logo design?

RK: The way that corporations have presented themselves to the public has changed quite a bit. Everyone has information at their fingertips, and consumers have a lot to say. We’re definitely a more consumer-driven society. So companies can no longer afford to be behind these big walls, in castles with big moats around them. It’s not just a matter of what representation you put forward for your board of directors or your shareholders, but really what kind of image do you want to convey to your consumer. That should bring a lot of humility: you need to understand it doesn’t matter how much money you’ve raised or how much prestige you have, but how can you really get your customers to trust your product.

This is also the age in which you the individual can have a huge reach from your home, in your pajamas in your loft apartment, you can reach anybody anywhere. How do you make your presence felt, convey who you are and what you’re bringing forth?

Ultimately, you always have to remember that a logotype really gets tied in with the product. If the product is not good, a good logo is not going to save it.

Her research is potentially fascinating for anyone the creative industries, looking as it does at the optimum level of constraint to place on an individual or team to effect creativity and innovation. Bad Idea recently met her to discuss her work and methods, and what practical measures can be taken to constantly produce fresh and effective ideas.

Bad Idea: How did you come to start thinking about these ideas?

Caneel Joyce: Doing my PhD at Berkeley, you really got to pursue your own work – I could do whatever I wanted and be the champion of my own ideas.

But it was both a blessing and a curse. Because I had no structure, I really struggled with deciding which of my ideas were worth committing to. I struggled with that for three years. I was trying so many things I was sending mixed messages to people, and it was hard to manage myself. And I realised I was probably not alone – my mother was an artist, and I saw her trying to do too many things at one time and the negative effect that had.

So it was that that I wanted to say – I wanted to see what can be done to help creative people to make decisions.

BI: So how did you start putting together your thesis?

CJ: When I really figured things out was when I did a laboratory experiment. We knew from past experiments that having no choice is bad for creativity, and generally experiments gave people choice or no choice. But I said: “I bet you there’s stuff going on between those two extremes”.

BI: I understand you gave groups four different levels of constraint. How did each group react to their test conditions?

CJ: The teams that constrained themselves the least, when you actually analysed what they were talking about, were the most constrained, in their heads. They just hadn’t made explicit those constraints. They had all these implicit assumptions that were limiting them from seeing things that were right in front of their face.  In a team setting, if you don’t make them explicit, you’ll have conflicts that you don’t understand. Untold assumptions lead to dramatically different interpretations of data, different ways of evaluating ideas. The teams that don’t make clear those assumptions were having the worst time.

If you’re 100% committed to making a specific and constrained idea like, say, an orange mug for toddlers, and then you go out and make a whole bunch of research, there’s a good chance that research is going to agree with you. So the higher constraint groups did really well, they ended up making the orange mug, but they had a hard time with data coming in – the more data that came in confirming their view, the more unified that group became, the more closed off. They didn’t learn that much.

The moderately constrained groups would talk about having two ideas on the table – mugs that were orange, and mugs for toddlers. And they would go out and they were very focused, and they would collect data that helped shed light on the validity of that idea. They were more open to being wrong, and the data was given meaning by the mild constraint.

What’s really interesting though, is if you look at intrinsic motivation – do I want to do this again, did I enjoy myself. All the research says that’s essential for creativity. But what I actually found is it just falls proportionally. The less choice people have, the less enjoyment people have and the less they want to do it again, even if they came up with a product the judges rated as being creative. People feel bad across the board as soon as you give them three choices instead of five.

BI: How are you translating these findings into the real world; what sorts of practical applications can you create?

CJ: If I’m doing a brainstorming session, I don’t get to ideas until at least halfway through – I spend the first fifteen minutes pulling out all of the assumptions, and putting them on the table. People don’t tend to share their real point of view if someone has already spoken, so before I get them all talking, I just get everyone to write down twenty words about the problem they’re trying to solve.

Then I get them to write twenty more, over two more minutes. They freak out – most business people think it takes a million years to come up with one idea, that you need to do tons of research. But they already know so much, they just don’t give themselves credit.

I get all their ideas, and see what’s common, and find the outliers. And then I say we’re not going to talk about this one anymore, because this other one you all really agree on, and we’ll commit to that. We can come back and revise this decision later, I tell them, and they say OK, as long as we can come back to it. But they never ask to come back! It’s tragic how much time we spend trying to decide on things.

I was working with a large hi-tech hardware company, and they wanted to devise a solution for reading, specifically how can we bring reading to teenagers. They came up with a bunch of ideas, like streaming through existing devices, or new hardware ideas, but they all decided bendiness was important. So we committed to only talking about bendiness. Then I opened it back up – we can talk about anything bendy, forget about reading, what can we do with a bendy digital device. But it’s constrained. I got them to go round really fast and hard in that space.

What our brains tend to do is find the easiest pathways to go down, the most familiar ideas, which are by definition the least creative. You have to be forced to examine all the ideas that are harder to get to, really thoroughly explore the area. The only way you can do that is to really limit what people can talk about.

You see these random TV shows that come out, and I think: I bet there’s a room with four hats in it, with a verb, noun, character and location, and they pull them out and write the show. You’d probably come up with a better idea with that than asking someone what’s really inspiring to them.

BI: But the problem is avoiding building in an innate conservatism from the original constraints. How do you keep everything fresh and creative?

CJ: Creativity is measured by multiplying novelty by usefulness. It has to be both. Usually we know our dimensions of usefulness – a mug is more useful is it is the right size, if it doesn’t have holes. If you know those already, to maintain creativity you can play with one of those dimensions – you can say I only care about this one, and I don’t care at all about the rest.

The other thing is trying to find a dimension that is completely independent – if we’re playing around with the concept of mugs, what’s an unrelated dimension? Politics. Can we design a Marxist mug? What would that be?

BI: Can you actually translate this thinking into real products?

CJ: Take the iPhone. They made a design decision that they were going to put the screen above all else, and that had implications for the rest of the phone. It meant you had to have a touch interface, and they limited it to one button. It was hard at first to get used to one button – I wanted at least a couple more. But not only was this the result of the designer’s constraint, that we’re going to play with the idea of the one-button phone, but it also forced me, the consumer, to learn a new way. And now all the developers are thinking what can we do with this lack of buttons.

And now that consumers are learning how to use the touch interface, if Apple releases a phone with multiple buttons, those buttons will be so much more useful.  I wouldn’t put it past them to do it, because they’ve done it with a lot of other products – the interface on their computers used to be locked down, you had to learn how to do things the Apple way. And then they opened it up, and now I can add more keyboard shortcuts. Doing this after we learned the old way is so much more valuable; if you have all of those ideas on the table at the same time and try to do it, it’s not going to work.

BI: So what would you specifically recommend to, say, a new product design team who are having trouble coming up with new ideas?

CJ: The structure is anything you want, but using one constraint is the best way to do it. If you’re only constraining one thing, you’re not eliminating that much, you’re just pulling it into focus. A lot of time in the creative industries there’s a lot of hesitation about putting restrictions on people. There’s two things to learn – one is that limits are OK, and two is that the limits need to be so explicit they can be argued with.

BI: How do you deal with people who may be very experienced and brilliant, but are stuck in a rut?

CJ: For them, the really random constraints are the best ones – you really have to shake them up. You have to be absolutely rigid – I believe in being really strict about the constraints you have, and then being completely lenient about everything else.

One of the best bits with constraints is that they relieve people’s anxiety that there might be constraints working out there unidentified. It relieves the burden on that person having to constantly re-evaluate their ideas. If it’s hard enough to find one Marxist mug idea, you not going to be worried that “is this a really good Marxist mug idea?” – you’ll go with whatever you’ve got.

There’s three things you can do to make this work in a business. One is have you leaders give really clear directions about the specific things they want to constrain, and make it clear that outside of them, anything goes. The second one is that if you’re struggling in moving on with something, pick a really random constraint and see how far you can take it. Thirdly, in teams, as early as you can in the process, make sure everyone on the team has fully vetted all of their assumptions so the team can fully agree what it looks like.

BI: But how can you breed in satisfaction with a finished product? Surely the constraints end up leaving people with a lot of ‘what ifs’.

CJ: Barry Schwartz, in his book The Paradox of Choice, found that all of these negative things happen when you have too many choices – you become less decisive, you become more regretful about any path you didn’t take, you basically become less happy even though you had more choice.

What he suggests is an approach where you’re aiming to find something good enough – you make really clear what are the criteria you have, and as soon as you find something that hits all those, you’re going to stop looking. The deeper you dive into something, the more you exhaust it, the more possibilities there are. And going further down the path doesn’t always lead to wonderland. If you’re unsatisfied, it’s not good to evaluate what might have been, and keep going forward. Try something new.

BI: You mentioned brainstorming earlier, which is a classic means of trying to generate ideas. Are there other modifications we can make to it?

CJ: The research is clear – you’re going to come up with fewer ideas in a group brainstorming session than you would brainstorming on your own. But there are benefits to brainstorming that go beyond having more ideas, especially in a cross-functional setting where you have really diverse expertise coming together, you really need to be able to share that. And the way to share that is have experts come up with ideas on their own, and then bring them together, and then riff on each others’ ideas. Otherwise, whoever speaks first frames the whole thing, and limits it.

Somehow, you and I are going to find what we have in common and miss what we don’t, so we’re only going to talk about that stuff. So the more you have in a room, the less there is to talk about. So you have to force sharing of the most unique ideas.

BI: What about dealing with prejudiced or narrow-minded staff? Or those with a rivalry?

Generally my approach is to, if possible, get it out in the open and make light of it. If you know there’s a rivalry for instance, use that, pit them against each other. It might be a good thing. If they shut people up, that’s one thing, but if there’s competition, that can help.

When you have the sexist person, or the person who dominates the group and thinks only they have the good ideas, I think there’s always a risk they’ll shut other people up. That’s where I think as a manager you’d want to create more structured time for individual idea generation, and structure the idea sharing. I always really look to outliers – giving a chance to hear them always creates a richer understanding.

A horizontal power structure is definitely better. I have a couple of papers on speed-storming, which is brainstorming crossed with speed-dating. Every couple comes up with an idea at the end of the three minutes, and you’ve completely dispersed that hierarchy. You can have a lot of people in a room and come up with really interesting ideas if you have the combination of two types of expertise again and again and again. That can be done in ten minutes. If there’s too much of a power structure, it’s bad for creativity, and if it’s occurring organically which it often does, anything you can do to separate people and then pull them together, helps.

BI: Does it help to have different types of people on the same team, or does it lead to unnecessary friction?

CJ: I’d have different levels of need for closure – this is the need to reach a decision regardless of what the decision is. The more diverse teams are on the need for closure, the better the team functions. You have some people driving towards consensus, and driving towards convergence on one idea – they’re pushing forward to depth, so you can move forward and implement. But then you have the people who are resistant to closure, and they’ll force the team to re-examine. Having a mixture of them is ideal for innovation.

The ‘high need for closure’ people tend to dominate, because they’re afraid. The other ones are more relaxed. And add in the functional element – say you’re an accountant, you have a really high need for closure, whereas your marketing or design person will have a lower need. Often within an organisation, they get dominated. So it’s important to teach people that there’s a natural tendency to want to rush to a decision, and you have to constantly help each other resist that temptation. The teams that really internalise that lesson, that see that for someone who needs closure, the constraints are hugely comforting – they can pin something down, only talk about one thing, and the rest of the group can relax.

BI: Inevitably, each sphere of work attracts a certain kind of person, and can lead to a kind of monoculture. What can you do when a group of people working together isn’t diverse?

CJ: Educating people. I know that sounds cheesy, but so much pain can be saved with a few warnings and lessons. And if you can increase your ability to predict, that if I do this as a leader people are going to behave in this manner, you can make more money.

If there’s homogeneity, you have to ask: how is this going to be dangerous to us? How am I a liability to myself? You might all tend to read biology – you have to say OK, some of us have to read other stuff. To create innovation, sometimes you have to resist.

Bad Idea: How has protection from terrorism changed in recent years?

Brooke Rogers: They used to build buildings and then start building the security around them – nowadays its much more extreme, people are talking to designers and architects about how to make it a building people can actually use, but which has more security.

If you go behind the scenes in new-build shopping centres, they are absolutely hi-tech, the security behind the scenes is fascinating. This has been built into these things ahead of time. We’ve got to a point where a lot of this is now common, to the point where a lot of the places that would be really attractive targets are very well protected. That shifts the threat to softer targets, so we need to look at flexible ways of protecting, say, events, or concerts, that don’t happen in the same place every time. The Olympics is a great challenge, in a good way, looking at flexibility of methods. We have a lot of bells and whistles, but some equipment is in other areas and we haven’t even thought to apply it yet. Quite often a technology that’s being used in environmental monitoring for greenhouse gases, all of a sudden has an application to security. We’re really encouraging this innovation of design, and of application.

BI: Can you give an example of this kind of cross-pollination of technology, from one field into counter-terrorism?

BR: Some of the applications I’ve seen come from the health field, where there are heart monitors you can stand quite far away from and read someone’s heart level. It isn’t implemented right now, but there are talks about could we use this in airports, to see if someone’s anxious. There are big issues around that, because if someone’s really nervous about flying, then their heart level is going to be up.

BI: What other new technologies are coming online?

BR: It various between countries, but say in Washington DC, we can install sensors in the environment that can pick up chemical release, be it a truck that has turned over and spilled chlorine. They can detect levels of radiation. These sensors can become both a help and a hindrance, and it is not unheard of to receive so many false alarms that the sensors are actually turned off.

Some of the airports are doing it very obviously, other airports more subtly, but since swine flu came out they’re taking heat readings off us as we come off the plane, to see if we have an elevated temperature. In a similar way, it’s possible that the heart-rate type thing can work. There are also other programs that can do things like gait analysis – it’s understanding if somebody’s moving in a nervous fashion. And if someone leaves a bag in a busy train concourse, they can scan the environment and realise that something that was not stationary is now stationary.

There’s no one solution – all of these sensors and ways of assessing the environment have to be built in with a lot of other ways of doing it, to make sure we’re not getting false readings. So if someone’s stressed out and moving erratically, maybe they’re running for a train.

BI: And that’s the difficulty with these technologies – when they get something wrong, it could be extremely upsetting and offensive for a wrongly accused person, let alone inefficient and potentially dangerous. How can you draw the line between what’s acceptable and useful, and what isn’t?

BR: Most of counter-terrorist strategy is about enabling people to carry on as normal. We can’t have airport-style check-in at train stations because it’s going to slow everything down. It’s finding the happy medium. Some of my colleagues and I look at public acceptability of counter-terrorism technologies, from CCTV to something more obvious, and at what point we oversecure an environment so that people don’t want to be there. My line is whether or not it discriminates against any one group, which brings all kinds of questions about profiling - at what level would profiling be used to filter this data, and so on.

Most people aren’t bothered by CCTV, there’s a lot of it. A lot of people are losing faith in CCTV – it’s something that works after the event, it’s great after they’ve killed you and they go to court. But what we’re looking at in terms of technology is something that can deter, so it can stop something from happening, or if something is happening then it can help us respond very quickly. The British public put up with CCTV, they assume there are environmental sensors out there – they’ll go with that, because it’s not impinging on any one social group. It’s when you start violating rights, or slowing people down, or start targeting specific groups, that they really revolt against it.

BI: How can you improve “public acceptability”, while still maintaining security?

BR: All this technology is grand, but there’s nothing like a human being walking around, or a human with a sniffer dog. Just having a physical presence makes people feel a lot safer.

Technology can be fallible, as we can be; it’s like when you talk about the energy solution for the UK, you always hear about this “basket of technologies”. I think we need to think about that as well, to combine technology with real people. It’s like when you ask a police officer: “why did you pull that car over?”, and they say “I don’t know, there was just something funny about it, I can’t put my finger on it”, and the car turns out to have a body in the trunk. There’s nothing like experience and instinct. But it can get you into trouble; there are all the debates with stop and search.

BI: So it’s a question of getting people to feel safe, and getting them “on side”?

BR: The government is keen on engaging members of the public, encouraging them to claim ownership of environment. It’s trying to bring back this community like you all had in the Blitz, when people got together. They’re really worried about frightening people. They’ve got a lot in place in order to respond, in order to make sure places are secure, but the human element and human senses are so valuable, and so they’re trying to find creative ways to talk to people about their communities. I’m sure you’ve seen the posters on the Tube, “If you suspect it, report it”, and so on, but after a while that kind of thing fades into the background. Like “mind the gap” – how many times have you heard that? You stop listening. So they’re trying to find some really engaging and creative ways to let members of the public take ownership of the environment.

Designers are trying to design environments that are very welcoming, but very secure as well, and make it somewhere that people want to go. These posters that show ladies having lunch and say “a terrorist attack was prevented because Mrs X saw something suspicious and reported it”, they’re trying to make a direct link with taking action in your environment. They don’t want to frighten people, but they don’t want to say “we want you to take responsibility for the environment because we can’t handle it”. They can handle it, but it’s almost like creating a public army – if everyone’s aware, then we’re so much better off.

Bad Idea: What inspired you to start Help Me Investigate?

Paul Bradshaw, Help Me Investigate: There were two main inspirations. One was the News Press crowdsourced investigation into utility collection charges in southwest Florida. The key thing for me was how popular that story became on the website – a story that would traditionally not be particularly popular in print, became their most popular story on the site ever, apart from hurricanes, mainly because people were engaged with the story themselves, because it was crowdsourced. So I wanted to provide a platform for that kind of engagement to happen on a more routine basis.

The other inspiration was a story on poisoned pet food in America. The official figures which were being reported in the media were that about 15 pets were affected, so a number of bloggers collaborated to investigate this. They found all sorts of useful things, about which pet foods were affected and so on, and collated a database of I think about 5000 dead pets and 15,000 that were affected. That was about handing the editorial agenda over to a wider section of people than traditionally happens in mainstream media.

BI: Is there a danger in using ordinary people to gather information, people without journalistic grounding? Is the quality of their work always good enough?

PB: There are more non-journalists than journalists using the site, but it’s been harder to train journalists to use it than it has been to train non-journalists. Having said that, journalists are increasingly understanding how it works and contributing some really useful information.

As for the ability of non-journalists to pursue investigations, the key idea behind the site is that it breaks down investigations into different elements, which are called challenges. There are certain things that journalists will be good at, like writing up the story, or getting an official response, or finding particularly hard to find information, like company information or regulations. But there is a lot of specialist knowledge on the site. One particularly big user of the site works in a financial firm, analysing things forensically, so he’s got tremendously valuable data analysis skills which few journalists have, and he’s able to bring that to figures that we get from freedom of information requests. Then there are people who use the site who are particularly knowledgeable about property, or about law. We had an investigation into clamping, and we had a retired law lecturer who added a legal interpretation of the law surrounding clamping and what to do, so that’s been tremendously useful. It’s really about playing to people’s strengths.

BI: So when the data has been collated, is it a case of then finding a journalist to write up and sell the story?

PB: We don’t sell stories, and we don’t write stories for that matter – the site is there to collect evidence. But quite often the investigation gets to a stage where you have to nudge a journalist and say by the way, you might want to get involved at this point. That’s been the case so far. As the site grows in numbers and reputation, and as journalists get more and more used to it, they’ll be more and more involved in the earlier stages.

I think it’ll work in a number of ways. In some instances you’ll get journalists who write a broad story and put all of their raw data onto the site, and ask people help get into the detail of that. We had a national story about hospital parking – we were specifically investigating one particular hospital, and their own figures, compared to some very broad figures obtained by a political party. So it allows you to drill down into that specific detail.

And it works the other way too – you might do a local investigation and then repeat that investigation nationally. You find out the figures in Birmingham, and then you do that for all the councils doing that particular thing.

BI: Is there any potential remuneration for any of your amateur investigators?

PB: There’s a slim chance, a long way down the line, but I’m not banking on that. Really the main reason that people do it is that it affects them personally, so really there shouldn’t be any financial motivation anyway. It’s about having a different editorial agenda, so rather than an editor making a decision that this is a story worth investigating, because it will get us x amount of readers and x amount of advertising, it’s about someone saying this might only affect two people, but we’re really angry about it, and we just need to find other people who are angry about it.

BI: How will the site itself subsist financially?

PB: The original idea was basically around third-party services. A good analogy would be WordPress – WordPress is free, but their business model is based on the spam filter they developed, and also for enterprise versions, so that would be an obvious business model we could work to. It’s quite likely that we’ll also look at some sort of public funding.

But certainly it doesn’t involve advertising, and it’s unlikely that it’ll involve white labelling with news organisations. It’s more likely to be something around: this is what the site does, and because of what we learnt through doing that and the data that’s produced doing that, we can use other things to support it indirectly.

BI: Would you consider a crowdfunding model?

PB: I think it could be one revenue stream, but I don’t imagine it would be big enough to support the whole operation. There would be investigations that require money to progress individually, and we would probably crowdfund for a specific investigation, but for the site as a whole I think it would be very difficult.

BI: Is there a crisis in funding investigative journalism stories in the local press?

PB: Certainly it’s less and less the case that there’s money for it. It’s always been a peripheral activity anyway, it’s never been a core activity; it’s been hard for people to fight for support within an organisation to do it, because quite often it would come to a dead end, and there would be nothing to publish, so that’s been squeezed out increasingly.

Help Me Investigate isn’t necessarily intended to be a replacement. It’s so that journalists who have a lead that they don’t have the time to explore or they don’t think is strong enough to justify spending time on, they could put that on the site, and others who might be passionate about it, or who might owe that journalist something from other investigations, they might do a bit of digging and help them out.

BI: Is investigative journalism antithetical to getting advertising spend? I’d imagine that it’s harder to persuade advertisers to advertise alongside an aggressively investigative story, than it is alongside “softer” content like culture or sport.

PB: I think that’s one of the challenges of news on the web – it gets atomised and broken up. So whereas before your travel supplement might subsidise your foreign news, you’re more likely to split the two apart and just have a travel website. Investigative journalism is always cross-subsidised, so that’s difficult now.

BI: While the high visibility of a crowdsourced investigation is its greatest asset when trying to collate and sort a lot of information, an investigation requiring even the smallest amount of subterfuge could be seriously hampered by crowdsourcing.

PB: Yes, and some investigations wouldn’t be suitable for that reason. Almost all investigations are pre-moderated, and if there was something like that, we’d probably put the person who requested it in touch with an investigative journalist, or point them to some kind of whistleblowing resource.

What Help Me Investigate is useful for is creating a common resource of knowledge, and a community interested in it. For instance, someone has been investigating a company that’s been taking money out of their account without permission; basically they’ve been conned. They found out various information about this company, but they don’t know what to do to get their money back. That information is public, so I recommended they write a blog post so other people who have invested in the same company can easily come across that information.

If I’m investigating the police in one city, then someone can follow what I’ve been doing and repeat that process in another city. It’s about sharing knowledge, but where subterfuge is needed, that is a problem. And we may have private investigations, invited investigations, to make it easier to keep it secret from the subject of that investigation.

BI: Looking at a more nationwide level, is there a serious funding crisis for investigative journalism?

PB: I’m not sure. Some news organisations are looking at paywalls – they’re going to be more driven by readers paying for content, so they’re going to have to get more unique content, which means more investigative journalism. So there may be that commercial pressure in that direction. And if the government changes regulations to make it easier for people to donate towards investigative journalism in order to claim back taxes, then that will link to some news organisations.

There’s certainly pressure on the government in the UK and US. There’s a whole move towards saying if we’re going to subsidise news organisations, then they need to pass the public interest test. Because it could be that it’s not just the BBC who’s receiving licence fee. Ultimately it depends on how the markets develops, and how the government treats regulation and laws and investments.

I think investigative journalism will always exist, but what shape that takes depends on the market. An increasing amount of investigative journalism has been done by organisations, like environmental organisations, animal charities, children’s charities – a lot of these organisations have done undercover reporting or research to find out information that was kept hidden. All those kinds of trends will be important in shaping change. But certainly people should look more broadly than news organisations for investigative journalism in the future.

Photo: John Welsh’s These Digital Times

What is ‘crowdfunding’? It’s when the money for a project is sourced from a wide base of people paying a relatively small amount, rather than a handful of investors who pay a lot more.

In a financially turbulent period for media, where the high cost of investigative journalism is becoming prohibitive for even the bigger news producers, Cohn’s model is one of the few ways that time-consuming, challenging journalism is being funded in the Bay Area. Spot.Us allows ordinary people to put their money towards information they value, and illuminate it for for the rest of their community.

We spoke with Cohn about the origins, finances and ideologies of Spot.Us, and how its revolutionary model fits into the rest the US media landscape.

Bad Idea: How did Spot.Us come about?

David Cohn: It was a confluence of things. I was the research assistant for a guy called Jeff Howe, who coined the phrase ‘crowdsourcing’– and in journalism, when you coin a phrase, you get a book deal, so I was his research assistant. I was researching the chapter on crowdfunding, things like kiva.org [an online microloans organisation] and I was thinking: can some of these same principles be applied to journalism?

The other part came out of being a freelancer. I was a freelance journalist for a while, and I really had the sense that the system by which freelancers work is somewhat antiquated. When they do freelancing it’s not that different from before the internet. Before, they would send snail mail to an editor, and the editor would decide whether or not they’re going to publish it. Now, they’re sending email, but other than that, it’s pretty much the same; it’s a one-to-one communication. And I wanted to see a system where freelancers could work in a much better market.

BI: How does the story-generation process work?

DC: All stories start with a pitch. It can be from an independent reporter, a news organisation, or from Spot.Us itself. If there’s an independent reporter working on it, then we’ll try and find a news organisation who’ll work with us [to publish the story]; if the pitch has come from a news organisation or from Spot.Us, then we’ll try and assign a reporter to it. Then we raise some money around it, and the reporter goes out and starts reporting. Then when they come back, if we’re not already working with a news organisation we’ll try to set up first publishing rights; if we’re able to, then the money goes back to the original donors so they can reinvest. Then we publish the story and have a beer.

BI: How have news organisations reacted to the idea?

DC: It goes back and forth – some news organisations are really easy to work with, and some still aren’t quite sure how to engage with other organisations. For example, working with Santa Cruz Weekly was really simple – they got the concept straightaway. Other organisations require seven meetings just to explain the concept to all the decision makers, then they decide whether or not to do it, then they decide who should be the one to engage with us… it’s three months of bureaucracy for something that should take two weeks. With the right news organisation we can fund a story in two or three weeks. So some news organisations are not necessarily beating down our door, because they’re not really equipped to work with other people. Other news organisations are.

BI: Is it the case that the larger the news organisation, the more bureaucratic it is?

DC: The larger as news organisation is, the harder it is to work with them, but then again I was surprised as all hell when I approached The New York Times for a story. Granted we met in person, but I just had one meeting with one key decision maker. The New York Times: you think they’d be the hardest to try and work with, but kudos to them – they were the lightest on their feet in terms of organisations we’ve worked with.

BI: Spot.us is obviously a reaction to the current state of investigative journalism – just how bad is it at the moment in the States?

DC: It’s definitely more bleak than it used to be. They don’t have the same resources to do investigations that they used to. I don’t think they’ve lost the will completely, I just think it’s becoming harder and harder for them.

Investigative journalism is always a loss leader – there is no way to make a profit off investigative reporting from advertising. That never happened, even in the past. But because classifieds were so robust, they could spend money on investigative reporting, and that was considered good for your brand. Now, since they don’t have the same profits from classifieds, are you going to dedicate your money to something that was making you money in the past, or are you going to go with the thing that never made you money? They’ll go with the thing that makes them money, even at the expense of their brand. Nobody likes it, but they accept it.

BI: Is Spot.us managing to make enough money?

DC: It depends. It’s enough to do what we want – nobody enters journalism because of money.

It’s important to know that we’re an experiment, and in transition – we’re still figuring out what this marketplace looks like, so it’s something that we’re evolving as we go. Non-profit journalism is making a rise in America, and that might be because we’re in this transition period. But investigative journalism might stay non-profit for a long time – either we’re in a period of transition, or a period of [permanent] change. Investigative journalism may never be supported by classified advertising ever again.

We have a couple of different sources of revenue. When people donate they are encouraged, but not required to donate 10% more to the operation of the site, and the majority of people do that, so that gives us a little bit of money. The 10% is almost enough to fund our hosting costs and other miscellaneous costs, so I feel pretty good about that. So as we expand to other cities, that too will expand.

There are other possible revenue streams, like advertising – I’m not against advertising on an ideological level or anything, so we might use that. Right now, the amount that we can make is so little that it’s not really worth it, but again if we expand it might make sense. We could also become a wire service, and syndicate our content.

BI: So Spot.Us is just one part of a larger revenue model?

DC: It is not the revenue stream. It’s naïve to think there’s any single revenue stream that’s going to replace what was a single revenue stream. Before, you had classified and advertising that paid for everything, because there was a monopoly on distribution. Now, the distribution is itself distributed, anyone can distribute, so the revenue streams are going to be distributed too.

I never try to sell Spot.us as something that will fund an entire news organisation, or fund an entire person’s career. We are ourselves going to be distributed, we’re raising money for all kinds of news organisations. I think that this kind of community-funded reporting could support anywhere from 5% to 30% of a news organisation’s revenue stream once it’s mature, but it’ll never support an entire news organisation.

BI: What with your crowdfunding business model, it seems like crowdsourcing would be a natural fit. Would you consider working on creating stories with the Spot.Us community?

DC: That’s possible. Essentially Spot.Us is trying to find out how to distribute the financial load of journalism, but we are going to try and branch out a little bit in the future at how to distribute the workload.

BI: A potential flaw with crowdfunded investigative journalism is that you have to announce what you want to write about before investigating it. Is that a significant weakness?

DC: It’s a weakness in that a lot of people have this concern, but I think it’s an antiquated concern if I’m honest. I guess there are some instances where you don’t want to broadcast, if it’s going to hurt a source – if you’re investigating the Mafia, you don’t want to put that on Spot.Us.

But the concern is often about scoops, and competition: “I don’t want another journalist to do this story first”. But scoops have the half-life of a link, which is very short, and in fact, by proclaiming the space and putting the pitch up there, you’ve already scooped everybody – you can elbow out that space. Even if people do similar articles you can link to it, incorporate that and call it ‘back reporting’ – they’ve done some of your research.

I think it’s naïve to think that stories are one-offs and the first person to do it is the only person who gets to do it right and everybody else sucks. And even if that is the case, you should put your pitch up as soon as possible, so if someone else does it you can point to it and say I knew this was going to happen and I’m working on it as well, and I’m going to do an even better job because you’ve already done some of it.

I think scoops have actually damaged journalism. Part of the reason why journalism is where it is, is because it created a sense of competition among journalists, which was good a long time ago but now, we have the ability to work with each other so easily, and we’re not using it because of this striving for scoops.

BI: So is there still an old-school approach to news in some newsrooms, that also manifests itself, for example, in a distrust of blogs?

DC: Some do still have that approach. Blogging is a content management system, not a type of reporting – you can’t say that’s ‘just a blog’, that’s like saying that’s just a piece of paper. What Spot.Us is doing is already way out there, and if they don’t understand what’s happening with blogging, they definitely aren’t going to understand Spot.Us. I also tend now to pick and choose my battles – it might not be worth it to try and engage with those news organisations.

But I think there is a lot of innovation in news organisations. I think we’re working out what the next model is going to be, and I think we need 10,000 startups, right? But I think news organisations are part of those startups, they’re trying to reinvent themselves too.

BI: A lot of the success of Spot.Us rests on whether the donors trust in journalists. Do you feel like you’re fostering enough of that trust?

DC: I think in journalism trust is always an issue, whether you’re trusting the organisation or you’re trusting the writer. Increasingly it’s going to be about trusting the writer; individual journalists are going to have their own independent careers, and people are going to like and dislike individual reporters just as much as they would have in the past liked or disliked news organisations. There’s a lot of trust in the writers, and usually with a pitch, a certain percentage of the donors know and like the reporter already. They already have a relationship.

BI: Do readers value investigative journalism enough, to pay for something that doesn’t directly affect them?

DC: That’s the million-dollar question – whether or not the public will view journalism as a civic duty that is worthy of their donation. We try and make it fun – you get to pick where your money is going to go, you can pick your cause. But in the end I don’t have a definitive answer to that – it’s what we’re trying to find out.

Do you live in the Bay Area and have a pitch to send David? Email him at david@spot.us, or visit www.spot.us for more information on donations and pitches.

Illustration: Vaughan Ward

As the editorial captain of Wired magazine, Conde Nast’s future-tech Bible, Anderson professes to behaving “like a complete fascist” towards his small corps of twenty-something staffers. Such totalitarian affectations are, of course, par in the U.S. magazine world, where successful editors are expected to cultivate an autocratic celebrity persona in the Simon Cowell mould: one part Elton John to two parts Lope de Aguirre. In most cases, the peacock plumage masks a deficiency of talent, but not so with Anderson, whose editorial chops are undisputed: Wired has won a series of National Magazine awards recognising its grabby design and editorial, and has an enviable national profile that defies its circulation figures.

Internationally though, it’s through his moonlighting gig as a ‘Big Idea’ authorial guru that Anderson is becoming best known. His 2006 book The Long Tail explained the economic miracle of Amazon.com, illustrating how a company could make more money selling niche products than mass products via the Internet, where shelf space is theoretically infinite. It catapulted him into an A-list of bestselling pop-theorists with Malcolm Gladwell and Thomas Friedman, and led to lucrative gigs on the business conference circuit: he currently delivers around 50 speeches a year at £20,000-£30,000 a pop.

In his new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, Anderson takes this idea even further, arguing that the near-zero ‘marginal costs’ of digital distribution – caused by the exponential decrease in the cost of computer processing power, hard drive storage and bandwidth – have created a new marketplace, where free pricing is practically a force of economic gravity. As Google, the poster child of the ‘free’ movement, has disrupted the conventional ad-funded media business model, so the digital economics of ‘bits’ is disrupting other industries in the ‘atom economy’, and Anderson argues that “every industry is either going to have to become free or compete with free” in the future.

“I didn’t invent this, I’m not predicting or projecting,” he says, with typically crisp enunciation. “I’m just looking at the data, and the data says in a world where inputs fall in price, price will fall. That economic model is just the law of physics, and the business models built around that are going to change dramatically.”

Many critics, including his fellow pop-theorist Gladwell in The New Yorker, disagreed with Anderson’s counter-intuition, with some of the more smart aleck pundits snickering that his evangelism for all things free hadn’t prevented his publisher from slapping a hefty RRP on the hardcover at Barnes and Noble (Anderson has pointed out that he did freely distribute digital and audiobook editions). 

Anderson was subjected to more justifiable criticism, however, when the literary journal Virginia Quarterly Review accused him of plagiarising passages of Free direct from Wikipedia without attribution. Responding rapidly, he owned up to failing to cite long passages taken from the online encyclopedia in the advance proof, and explained that pressures to meet publishing deadlines had led to his failure to conduct “write-throughs” of text written by Wikipedians, in which he would have rewritten their entries using different word choices. It was a shaky defense, especially from someone with such a lofty editorial reputation, and many blog commenters took Anderson to task for what they considered, at best, sloppy practise and at worst literary fraud, plain and simple (Anderson later defended himself against the plagiarism charge, telling a reporter in a televised CNN interview, “We live in a remix age…”).

Viewed in retrospect it’s understandable – although not entirely excusable – that Anderson cut corners writing the book, as his resources appear to have been thinly spread at the time. Apart from the editorial duties at Wired, there were conference speeches and travel, the research and writing work for a 75,000 word manuscript, and also commitments to his startup companies BookTour, an author appearance calendar website, and DIY Drones, a remotely operated aircraft community site – and all this at a time when he was bringing up a young family and also suffering from Lyme disease.

It would be a shame if the Wikipedia scandal were to overshadow the ideas set forward in Free, which are genuinely provocative in challenging our inherent distrust of the concept of ‘free’ itself, or what Anderson characterises as ‘twentieth century free’.  Anderson cites two pioneering examples of this hundred year old marketing gimmick in Jell-O’s free distribution of gelatin recipe books to promote a novel dessert product and King Gillette’s bundling of free razors with packets of gum and marshmallows, in order to stimulate demand for disposable razor blades. In both cases, ‘freebie’ products were used as a lure to bait customers into spending more than they intended.

The popularity and subsequent public awareness of the practise has shaped common, sceptical attitudes towards ‘free’ that endure to this day – further proof that, as the economist Milton Friedman liked to say, “there’s no such thing as a free lunch.” But, Anderson contends, that was then.

“We have a complicated relationship with free: we’re drawn to it, but we’re also repelled by it,” he says. “But twenty-first century free is different from twentieth century free. If your supermarket has a sign that says ‘free beer tomorrow’ you should be suspicious that tomorrow will never come, but when Google says, ‘Gmail is free’, I don’t think you need to be suspicious. In the atoms economy -we understand there must be real costs, and those costs must be paid directly – so there can’t be a free lunch. But in the digital economy the costs are manageable, and there can be a free lunch. Someone is paying, but it’s not you.”

And it’s not just in the digital world: in the ‘atoms economy’ many companies have taken a page from digital ‘twenty-first century free’ and reinvented their industries by offering loss leader products and services to profit from indirect revenue streams – what is known as a ‘cross subsidy’. In analysing this topic, Free isolates a popular new business trend; in aviation, Ryanair has rapidly grown into the largest largest airline in Europe by selling its flights for next to nothing. How? A healthy margin is made via ancillary revenues: charging for baggage, check-in fees, credit card handling fees, shares of car rentals, hotel bookings, and so on. Anderson lists other companies who are making money by giving away TV set top recorders, stocks, directory phone assistance, CDs, secondhand goods – even a general store of free products (respectively: Comcast, E*Trade, GOOG-411, Prince and The Mail on Sunday, Freecycle, and Japan’s SampleLab). A particular Anderson favourite is the Portuguese media company Controlinveste, who gave away a 60-piece silverware set, day by day, with the purchase of a newspaper. The boost in revenue from newsstand and advertising sales far exceeded the cost of the Chinese-made cutlery, and the company made a healthy profit.

“Essentially, they found a way to put advertising on spoons,” he says, triumphantly. However, mindful that advertising is no safe bet in a recession, Anderson proposes the most interesting businesses today employ a ‘freemium’ template: that is, free products that upsell premium services. This is the model used with varying degrees of success by online applications like Flickr, Skype, Spotify, Vimeo and others, marrying the reach benefits of digital free with the direct profit of paid.

“The old model for business was ‘make something people will pay for’. The new model is ‘make something people will want and something they’ll pay for’,” he says.

As Free notes, some of the most interesting new applications of the ‘freemium’ model can be found in the video games industry, particularly in free-to-play online multiplayer games, where virtual goods and subscription features generate huge revenues. Originally developed by New Horizon Interactive, the Club Penguin website hosts a ‘massively multiplayer online game’ (MMOG) that became a playground craze in the U.S. after its launch in 2005. By late 2007, there were 700,000 subscribers paying for ‘igloo upgrades’ on the Club Penguin site, and New Horizon Interactive was purchased by Disney in a deal that would be worth a total of US $700 million.

Many modern applications of the tiered pricing model are highly imaginative, and none more so than Radiohead’s 2007 ‘honesty box’ experiment. Fans of the Oxford band were invited to pay what they perceived their new album In Rainbows to be worth before downloading it from Inrainbows.com. According to Anderson, In Rainbows sold more than 3 million copies via direct downloads, CD’s, a deluxe CD/vinyl box set and mp3 sales via digital retailers, and the album proved the band’s biggest commercial success, with 100,000 sales of the £40 box set and 1.2 million tickets sold for a subsequent tour.

But it’s hard to deny that for every music industry innovator like Radiohead, there are ten independent record labels that have ceased trading, and few can convincingly make a case for the digital revolution leaving the music industry in a healthier condition. While few consumers will shed a tear at the decline of large record companies, in an increasingly fragmented market a small number of highly commercial acts – and the companies backing them – disproportionately harvest the income from emerging revenue streams. The Sony-owned entertainment company Syco is currently demonstrating this in the UK with its X-Factor TV show, which has leveraged its commercial worth to the ITV network into an unprecedented dominance of the national music charts.

On a grander scale, Google’s revolutionary free-centric business model, which is heavily reliant on selling search advertising against indexed Internet content, has been accused of contributing to the ‘demonitisation’ of entire industries – from news media to software and telecoms. Thanks to the “network effects” that take hold in digital markets, Internet brands combining a clear niche in their specific field with mass distribution strategies that harness the power of ‘free’ tend to dominate global market share, creating virtual monopolies that can be extremely difficult for competitors to challenge. Google CEO Eric Schmidt describes this approach to achieving mass adoptions as the “max strategy.”

For those who work in industries that have been disrupted by such technological and business innovation though, the ultimate cost is unemployment – a process that can be traumatic. What happens to workers when expensive people businesses become inexpensive software businesses? And is this process really so beneficial for a nation and its communities? Anderson addresses this topic in Free, but never wholly convincingly.

“You either move upstream or you don’t,” he says. “It’s really simple: 10 years ago, I had a travel agent, a stockbroker and a personal tax accountant. They’re all software now, they’re all free. So what happened to my travel agent, stockbroker and my tax accountant? Well, some of them are driving cabs, and some of them moved upstream: my stockbroker became a financial advisor, my personal tax accountant became a corporate tax accountant. They moved upstream to where specialised skills were required – and they got paid more for it, by the way. It’s exactly what you saw with the coal miners in Wales. What happened to them?”

The answer is that the majority (or rather their progeny) work in taxpayer funded local council jobs, while many do not work at all. In 2008, approximately 25% of the potential working population of Wales was economically inactive, with close to 30% working in the public sector. It is not a picture of economic health.

“Well it’s a lost generation,” says Anderson. “For most of them, there’s really nowhere to go upstream. If you’re a coal miner, you can’t be a gold miner… That’s hopefully not the case for most industries. But this is not new; the hot type pressmen, the guys who shoveled coal into boats – all these people have been displaced, and it happens time and time again; software is just the second wave of outsourcing. The first time your job was replaced, it was by an Indian, and then his job was replaced by software.

“There is no simple answer to what happens to the displaced. Some land on their feet and find a better job. Some don’t.”

As the questions come to an end, Anderson droops in his chair and massages his temples with both hands. He ushers me out of the Wired office, past posters of magazine covers that trail lead features about secret Wall Street formulas, groundbreaking technological innovations and the like, and I can’t help but reflect on the throwaway line about coalminers and goldminers: perhaps now he travels business, Anderson doesn’t meet many of the twenty-first century ‘coal miners’ for whom his economically upturned future is a source of profound anxiety? He is an extremely bright man but can seem emotionally detached at times. 

I can’t help but wonder whether his rosy view of the world – where digital economics spreads the wealth around, entrepreneurial innovation trumps state incompetence, and the economically displaced saunter “upstream” into better paid jobs – will have dark consequences. It’s easy to imagine a future following such trends where dying ‘demonitised’ industries are not adequately replaced, millions are dispossessed of a stable income, economic inequality accelerates towards a form of globalised plutocracy and violent social upheaval follows. Some might argue this is an unavoidable staging post in the post-industrial evolution of capitalist nations (Karl Marx might sympathise). But while the democratisation of information in the digital age can be intoxicating, the rise of hegemonic forces like Google and the fragmentation of an economic base that once provided jobs on a mass scale suggests the Internet’s promise of individual empowerment and untrammelled opportunity is chimeric.

Anderson appears uninterested in exploring the juicier political implications of his economic theories, presumably because it might make his business and tech industry clients uncomfortable. Optimism is never in short supply amongst those who identify with Silicon Valley’s ethos of pro-active evolution, after all. Nevertheless, while Anderson must be applauded for bringing the story of our collective drift to digital economics into the public sphere, until he convincingly addresses the wider political and societal problems that will be created by this outcome, his enthusiastic claim that ‘free is the best price’ should be qualified with an acknowledgment that it is not necessarily one without a cost.

Illustration: Jim O’Raw

Photograph: Joi @ flickr 

While much of our content will look at innovative collectives, companies and ideas, sometimes we’ll come across an individual so forward-thinking that we feel weak with the kind of adulation usually associated with the Jonas Brothers. They could come from the arts, sciences, political thought, universities, thinktanks, mobile phone companies – a Tomorrow Person is anyone who has a fresh idea, and an effective way of letting people know about it and making it happen. And as well as us profiling these paragons, we’ll be getting them to write blogs, to find out their opinions on shifts and trends in their particular industries.

We’ve already lined up a regular monthly slot looking at the business side of the UK’s hottest young fashion designers, and we hope the section will end up becoming a Who’s Who of innovation professionals in Britain.

How awesome are these credits by the way?

Anywhere in the Caribbean is beautiful in December. But there’s something special about Jamaica as Christmas approaches. The air from the mountains sweeps down to the sea and brings a cooling wind known as the Christmas breeze. And since the island has just emerged from the rainy season, there is a lushness not seen at other times of year.

I always try to spend as much of the month here as I can. Apparently, Richard Branson feels the same way. En route to Necker, he stopped by for breakfast one recent morning, and I happily made the drive from Kingston to Montego Bay to meet him.

He’s clever, no doubt; one of those folks who was probably just born with a knack for business. The regular bloke image doesn’t seem contrived. If anything, in person, he is even more unassuming than the image he cultivates for his brand.

On a terrace overlooking the sea, we drank Blue Mountain coffee and talked of the global crisis. The conversation ranged over many issues, but one strand seemed to weave itself through each branch of the conversation: the challenges of entrepreneurship in difficult times.

I reckon he’s earned the right to opine on that topic. He started what would become his Virgin empire in the 1970s. A government then that had tried something like a “Cool Britannia” campaign would have been laughed out of the international hall. Britain was decaying, everyone knew it, and the real question was whether she would turn in on herself in doing it.

In short: not the time to launch a business based on cool. But the secret of his success – and it’s not really much of a secret – is that he can spot the opportunity in a decline. When it comes to recessions, Richard Branson departs from the script; he sees good times ahead. As businesses fold, assets become cheap. Dynamic new firms then have a chance to expand their operations.

It’s not a vision for everyone, of course. For the dynamic firms feast on the corpses of the less competitive ones, a re-generation the economist Joseph Schumpeter called ‘creative destruction‘. The result is an economy in which the strong survive, but the weak are left to – well, not everyone gets to have his own island in the Caribbean.

So it’s hardly surprising that Mr. Branson has little time for bailouts. He judged that if a financial sector is healthy, the rest of the economy can adjust to difficult times. Thus, he said, governments did the right thing in bailing out the banks: no matter how odious their behaviour had been during the boom days, it would be cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face to let them collapse during this bust they helped create.

Nonetheless, when it came to, say, car-makers or airlines, he felt that consumers would suffer if the government kept running to the rescue.

Those who cannot hack the heat should leave the entrepreneurial kitchen. That was the gist of his message. The government should use its scarce resources to protect the weakest people in its society, but not the weakest businesses.

What is the best way to look after the weakest people? In part, at least, by allowing a competitive market to determine who prospers in business, and who doesn’t. For all the difficulties of the moment, Richard Branson remains convinced that when the most dynamic firms can thrive, the most people will end up with jobs.

His faith, and optimism, is unshaken. Capitalism is going through a rough spell, he said. But he insisted it has worked for a thousand years, and should be allowed to work for a thousand more.