At Macmillan we try to encourage and facilitate a decentralised, entrepreneurial culture. There isn't a company in the world which doesn't try to do that (or says it is trying to do it). But how do you measure whether you're succeeding? I've just tripped over one indicator of success.
It is the discovery that one of our businesses, ICC Macmillan, based in Portland Oregon has developed a service to allow publishers a simple way of selling their content through mobile phones and PDAs. The announcement is here. Why is this an indicator of decentralised, entrepreneurial success? Because the press release was the first I'd heard of it. It sounds great.
It's not just me that thinks the innovators at Nature are outstanding. This is an extract from the latest Outsell Newsletter:
* Nature Publishing Group has now launched so many innovative Web 2.0-style initiatives that the development floor of its London offices is being referred to as "the Natureplex." Scintilla, a new information filtering and personalisation aggregator, is the latest service to launch, and indicates not only Nature's understanding of the ways in which scientists work, but also how the range of services might start to come together....
...And no self-respecting Web 2.0 service is complete without some form of social element - indeed, Nature.com users already have social services available through the Nature Network
sites that currently serve London and Boston. Like Scintilla, these services offer the opportunity to set up groups (either around a lab or institution, or around a topic), and it seems likely that, since these services operate off a common user database, facilities of this sort will start to tie together so that the Nature offerings form a contiguous whole rather than a patchwork quilt. Patching these offerings together is more easily said than done - troublesome items, according to Scintilla developer Euan Adie, include issues such as data protection and user privacy. As the latest in a series of innovative services Connotea, Postgenomic, Nature Precedings, Scintilla, whose name means spark of inspiration, shows that inspiration is one thing that the NPG development team certainly does not lack.