IBM's innovationjam Brainstorming Wingding

Posted by: Steve Hamm on October 09

IBM invited me to participate in its innovationjam this week, so I poked my head in a few times during the five-day experiment in global collaboration. Fascinating. The company built a huge Web 2.0 application in the computing cloud that is part mega-brainstorm session and part marketing event.

IBM invited 100,000 or so employees, clients, partners, and journalists to participate. The theme: Building the enterprise of the future. The theme emerged out of the findings in the company’s recent Global CEO Study, which showed that while CEOs of 1100 companies spread around the world believe their companies have to adapt to the changing global economy, but don’t know how to do it.

The topic is even more relevant due to the global financial meltdown, and that showed in the registration stats for the jam. More than 700 corporate executives signed up in the first month after registration began, and an additional 300 signed up in just the three days after the stock market meltdown on Sept. 29. In times like these, new ideas can, potentially, provide a lifeline—or at least a bit of hope.

To channel discussions, the jam designers segmented it into four topic threads: adapting to survive, customers as partners, globally integrated organizations, and environmental and social sustainability. Participants came up with dozens of subthemes.

I poked around in the various discussions without commenting. I just feel more comfortable in the observer/reporter role than being an actual participant. (Maybe I'll be braver next year--assuming they invite me back.) There was a lot of earnest talk, which isn't surprising given the gravity of our situation. There were also some compelling ideas floated.

One of those came from Jay Kalaimani, an employee of IBM India, who was quite prolific--contributing 62 posts. In the one that caught my eye, He suggested a "psychometric monitoring application" that would assess your thoughts and stress levels, real-time, every day, alert people when they crossed into the bad mental health zone and give them tips on how to improve their outlook.

Early in the week I checked to see if the IBM big shots were participating, but didn't see much--just a few posts from business consulting chief Ginni Rometty and quite a few from big-brain techie Bernie Meyerson. Where was CEO Sam Palmisano, I asked, and was assured that he'd weigh in eventually.

Which he did. I checked after the jam ended on Thursday and saw that he had posted 10 times on a wide range of subthemes. In a discussion of the plight of the banking industry, he pointed out that many leaders simply don't know how to react to today's challenges. "What has happened over the past month shows us how powerful the impact of that change can be. Entire industries can disappear overnight," he wrote.

In another posting, he mused on the challenges facing corporate leaders as they confront a rapidly changing global business environment. "I think leadership will require a combination of qualities that seem paradoxical--both global ambition and humility," he wrote. Why humility? "Because the playing field today goes far beyond your own sphere of control." You're got to entrust your company's fate partially to the global network of partners and suppliers you chose. "No individual leader, no matter how big the company, can control such truly global consequences and contexts. Indeed, the impossibility of control is the point."

The jam attracted quite a following. More than 85,000 people logged in producing more than 29,000 posts.

But the jam is intented as much more than just an inspiring gabfest. It's also a marketing and business development event. IBM offers to follow up with individual clients and help them work on those changes they see they need to make in their companies. It also plans on launching new business initiatives based on a handful of the ideas generated in the jam.

After the innovation jam in 2006, IBM formed nine mini business units to try to exploit opportunities suggested by participants. The most interesting one, as far as I'm concerned, is one aimed that ultimately got the name Intelligent Transportation Systems. It provides systems for gathering, managing, and disseminating real-time data about metropolitan transportation networks--so they can be optimized to improve the flow of traffic. The company already has orders from the UK, Singapore, Dubai, and Australia, and a proof-of-concept system working in Stockholm, Sweden. In the first year of operations, the Stockholm system helped reduce traffic by 18 percent and the percentage of green vehicles on the roads increased to 9 percent.

IBM and other big companies have been pushing innovation for a few years now, and innovation fatigue is beginning to set in. But the jams show that this kind of exercise can produce not just good feelings and good ideas but good results.

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