There's not a lot of good news coming from the business side of newspapers these days, and nowhere is the situation more grim than at the Tribune Company, which just sold the beloved Chicago Cubs, still owns the struggling Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, and has been operating under bankruptcy protection since December 2008, with little hope of emerging any time soon. But as Plato, that noted corporate strategist, famously said, necessity is the mother of invention — and the troubles at the Tribune Company have inspired at least one intriguing approach to unleashing some inventive ideas for the future.

The organization's top brass has turned to front-line employees to devise new ways to generate revenue, to conduct their own forms of R&D. At the Tribune, though, R&D doesn't stand for research and development. It stands for "rip off and duplicate."

The theory? So many journalists and business-side employees are in touch with so many creative initiatives in other fields, why not look for revenue-generating ideas that are working elsewhere and figure o