Economist Group’s £100,000 project to think up a social web platform may have flatlined last year - but the publisher now has another long tail to pin on the 10-month affair… a book chronicling the experience.

SEE ALSO: Economist Innovation Project Ends Without A Product; Community Idea In “Cold Storage”

Codenamed Red Stripe (yes, like the Jamaican beer), the project charged six Economist folks, under CIO Mike Seery, with “creating an innovative and web-based product, service or business model by July 2007” - but the effort finished with the publisher conceding “it was not obviously something that The Economist Group should do”.

Now writer and publisher Andrew Carey has penned Inside Project Red Stripe, out October 21 - a £20, 232-page recollection of the episode for his Triarchy Press which is intended to share the experience. The theory goes - Red Stripe was not so much a failure as a bold experiment in trying to instill a publisher with an innovative digital incubator; and other publishers looking to do the same might learn from Economist’s mistakes and wins.