With that in mind, I’ve been shopping around an idea to support innovation through an investment in knowledge development across the organisational charts as it’s clear that it’s not only those at the bottom rungs that need to know how to do new things; those higher up need to know what new things need doing (as Patrick Smith has also recently pointed out).

In short, my argument is that while the starving industry certainly needs some fish if it’s to survive these (particularly) lean time, it also needs to learn new ways of fishing.

To support the learning at a time when those budgets that did exist are being/have been cut, I’ve proposed a tax rebate on training of up to 1% of payroll. The idea has been given some air on the World Editors Forum blog (via journalism.co.uk) and also echoed by the Society of Editors in toproposal to Andy Burnham.

My original blog post is here.

Let me know what you think – and if there’s anything else I can do to pitch in.