Creativity and Innovation at Yale Publishing Course

We're taking it up a notch at Yale Publishing Course with a day dedicated to creativity and innovation. No idea too strange, we're all friends now. And how can the experience of students from all over the world serve to cross pollinate our business?

Speaking of cross pollination, Professor Olav Sorenson of Yale School of Management brings in some insights from the film and music business to spur ideas and dialog. Are we still making most of our money from print because print is still robust--or is it because we are doing something wrong in digital? What new approaches might we consider? Could we offer magazines without ads at a higher price digitally? What about unbundling the magazine and selling single stories? Is it conceivable to offer eBooks with ads at a lower price or for free? What about offering eBooks as rentals?

And how about managing creative people? Dorothy Kalins has spent her career doing just that. To get true collaborative idea generation, to come up with audacious solutions, your management approach might include a tolerance for idiosyncratic behavior (as creativity comes with a measure of craziness); an preparedness for confrontation; an ability to make the tough decisions; an understanding of the natural enemies in the process; and cookies. Never forget the cookies.

Peter Workman of Workman Publishing and Dominique Raccah of Sourcebooks drop in to give some examples of creativity and innovation in independent book publishing. Why do a book, Workman asks, if it isn't one of the best of its kind? It is the role of publishers to provide information in a creative and entertaining way. The publisher's job is to surprise and delight with the unexpected. Raccah shows how this creativity can be carried over to enhanced ebooks and apps. This is a game you play at your own risk! But the opportunties are enormous. It's an explosion in the amount of work we have to do, a rethinking of the risk/reward/investment equation, and the management challenge of running two publishing companies--the one that was, the one that will be. You need to be a digital entrepreneur while running a traditional publishing company. If this is to work, your culture must be proactive, focused, optimistic, possibility-driven.

The challenge of apps, according to Neil de Young of Hachette Digital, is that we have great new opportunities now--with unproven potential in a low-priced market. We as publishers are going to have to grapple with managing our authors' expectations and coming up with ways of creating a relationship between costs of development and potential revenues.

The revolution going on, its challenges and opportunities, are calling on all our resources as publishers to ride the waves of change. A tool to help us through these times is what Peter Kreisky of the Kreisky Media Consultancy calls adaptive strategy, an approach that builds agility into and organization to enable it to deal with change. Not only are our systems changing, our very language is going to have to change--the words we use to identify our industry need to grow with our business in order not to lock us into outmoded expectations.

There is no silver bullet, Mark Miller of Newsweek concludes. It's a question of listening to readers, trying new things, being true to the brand, and rising to the opportunities presented by digital.

Linda Ruth is a co-founder of Exceptional Women in Publishing (www.ewip.org). She is blogging from Yale Publishing Course (http://publishing-course.yale.edu/).