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.

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.

During the course of Red Stripe, the project went back on its pledge to conduct the ongoing experiment in public and played with several ideas, the last of which being “Lughenjo, a Facebook for the Economist Group’s audience”. Carey also plans to release book chapters periodically, by email and as blog posts. Economist.com may yet re-use some Red Stripe ideas in future social media efforts.

• Economist Innovation Project Ends Without A Product; Community Idea In “Cold Storage”
• Economist Taps Red Stripe Detritus To ‘Build A Purely Online Audience’
• Economist Ready To Try ‘Social Networking’ Again