SwampFox

Rather than be half pregnant, Encyclopedia Britannica ought to buy Collexis

Submitted by: John Warner on Apr 19, 2008 at 11:28 am Tagged with: Academia, Higher Education, Innovation, Open Innovation Source: Swamp Fox

Share your thoughts below
The current education establishment is built around an authority model of knowledge. The objective is to climb the latter of expertise, until you are recognized by the your academic peers as the expert in a disclipline that is narrow and deep. Academics would argue they're not about creating knowledge silos, but that is often the result of the current academia model of knowledge. Even academics who are further down the chain, like K-12 teachers, have completely bought into this model that knowledge is only reliable in the hands of experts.

The academic party is in the process of being upset, as we noted earlier, by upstart encyclopedia Wikipedia, the cockroach of the education establishment. So here is a very interesting post about the encyclopedic gold standard of the academic authority model, Encyclopedia Britannica Now Free For Bloggers.

Everything was great for the nearly 250 year old privately held company until the Internet came around and category five hurricaned on their parade. According to Comscore, for every page viewed on Brittanica.com, 184 pages are viewed on Wikipedia (3.8 billion v. 21 million pave views per month).

As the post notes, right now Encyclopedia Britannica is now trying to be "half pregnant" with a program called "Britannica Webshare." They want to be an authority, but they want to be open too. One thing I'm certain about from the sum total of my scars is that being half pregnant in the middle of a market is an extremely difficult, and in the long run probably impossible, place to be.

If Encyclopedia Britannica wants to compete head on with Wikipeda, Britannica would be better off creating an entirely new business unit that is not constrained by the culture, values, and processes of the existing Britannica business model. This business unit needs to be independent and have support at the highest levels of the organization, because there will certainly be wailing and gnashing of teeth over this upstart crossing over to the dark side by those who manage the existing Encyclopedia Britannica model.

Alternatively, Encyclopedia Britannica could build strength in areas where the authority model still highly relevant, which also is likely to be places where the Wikipedia model is not serving customers well. The classic attack on the open knowledge model is that you wouldn't want your brain surgeon getting him information from Wikipedia. True, but you wouldn't want her knowledge limited to Encyclopedia Britannica either. If Encyclopedia Britannica is going to continue to be relevant in the future, then perhaps it needs to become a portal to deep base of peer reviewed content by authorities. So if our brain surgeon read a summary by an authority on a reverent topic in Britannica, the surgeon could link to the more in depth peer reviewed content by that authority so the surgeon could thoroughly understand the issue before she operates on me.

There is actually already a company that is well down the path in indexing this type of authority content, and they happen to be in Columbia, SC, Collexis. (More about Collexis on Swamp Fox).

Collexis High Definition Search enables extraordinary knowledge retrieval and discovery quickly and accurately by utilizing fingerprinting technology. The Collexis Fingerprint empowers users to immediately identify and search for documents, experts, trends, and new discoveries more quickly, accurately – and deeply – than conventional search engines.

With an Encyclopedia Britannica front end to sample experts and cross pollinate ideas, which is where most of the really transformation innovations come from, and a Collexis back end to do a deep dive into authority literature, now we're talking about birthing something new and powerful. That's a whole lot better than trying to become some type of half-Britannica, half-Wikipedia mutant.