Encyclopaedia Britannica, the publisher long known for big sets of printed books, is today 100 percent digital. That’s right; no more books. Two hundred and forty-eight years after that first encyclopedia rolled off the presses in Edinburgh, Scotland, Britannica is a purely digital company. And we’re growing.
We like to think we are the “oldest start-up in history.” Many people don’t know that Britannica actually began publishing online more than 20 years ago and that we were one of the first companies of any kind on the Internet. I won’t belabor that whole story because it’s just a prologue to what we’ve done in the past four years, moving way beyond encyclopedias and reference works and accelerating the development of digital education solutions for the 21st-century classroom and the consumers of today.
A few examples of how the digital revolution has unfolded at Britannica in the past few years:
- We’ve leveraged responsive and adaptive design.
- We’re using lean start-up methodologies to discover opportunities and drive product development.
- We’re focused on user-centric product development methods.
- We’ve adopted big data with distributive databases.
- We’re integrating social capabilities into our products.
- We’re aligning our content to the semantic taxonomy.
- We’re reconstructing our SEO strategy.
- We’re moving to 100 percent open-source architecture.
As we drive more digital innovation, it brings challenges, learning, uncertainty, and opportunities. It also pushes our team continuously to combine great brand attributes with new technical and digital solutions.
We are constantly driven to combine great brand attributes with new technical and digital solutions.
Britannica today is constantly evolving and innovating. Every team in the organization is going through a lot of changes and trying to rapidly learn so we can always create better digital solutions that solve problems users want to pay for right now. And we’re beginning to understand how to fail fast, yet learn.
This is the first in a series of posts that will tell a story – a digital conversion story – with learning moments around product development, technology, digital solutions, people, and lots of change.
Britannica has been in business for almost two hundred and fifty years. We are setting the stage to grow for another two hundred and fifty years. To survive is to change. In order to change, we must reinvent how we do business in a rapidly changing Edtech and consumer market. The only way to grow is to create the environment to innovate. If you want to innovate, you have to fail fast, furiously, fastidiously—and learn rapidly. We have to do it and we are doing it every day.
More to come.
