IBM goes public to collect ideas

Company narrows 37,000 concepts from global brainstorming session to 30 marketable plansBY JON VANPublished October 1, 2006
YORKTOWN HEIGHTS, N.Y. -- Don't tell Sam Palmisano that old saw about too many cooks spoiling the broth.Last spring, after having seen an array of IBM's cutting edge research, IBM's top executive ordered a high-tech brainstorming session stretching across 77 countries and involving 53,000 people.IBM employees are still analyzing the fruit of Palmisano's session, 37,000 ideas. But by November, they expect to launch some new products, businesses or services stemming from the exercise, which Palmisano dubbed InnovationJam.Over the next two years IBM expects to spend as much as $100 million taking InnovationJam ideas to market."Innovation today is changing radically," said Palmisano, who noted that using conventional methods IBM regularly wins more new patents than any other U.S.-based company. But even so, the company probably isn't keeping up with competitive pressures, Palmisano decided."So, I thought, let's expose these advanced projects to all of our employees around the world, and some clients and business partners, too--even our own families--and see what they come up with."IBM managers, scrambling to come up with a context for the discussion, built several Web sites to give participants information about technologies in the company's pipeline--things like supercomputing, real-time foreign language translation and advanced water filtration based on nanotechnology.Here they comeBy July, the jam's first phase was on. Ideas flowed in online from around the globe as well as from employees at 67 companies allied with IBM and some spouses and offspring of IBM employees.IBM managers then used automation to winnow the 37,000 offerings down to 300 defined ideas. Finally, more than 50 employees came to IBM's Watson Research Center to work in teams for most of a week to further combine and trim ideas to around 30."The majority of ideas contributed in any brainstorming situation aren't all that good," said Edward Bevan, IBM communications vice president and a jam leader. "They're either naive or misinformed or they failed before with good reason."Without advanced technology to help toss out bad ideas, a global-scale project such as this would be impossible, said Cathy Lasser, IBM vice president for industry solutions and emerging technologies. "Especially working in this time frame required automation," she said.In mid-September, the jam's second phase commenced. Participants scrutinized the 30 proposals, wrote business plans and suggested market strategies."It won't take long for them to declare this a success," said Marc Knez, a clinical professor of strategic management at the University of Chicago's graduate business school. "How many products do you need to get to market to call it a success?"IBM isn't alone in seeking to tap knowledge from workers throughout its sphere, said Knez. "It's a common problem for large tech companies," he said. "They want to leverage knowledge within and at the edge of the organization."Still, IBM's effort is unprecedented in its scope and scale, Knez said, and it has the support necessary to succeed since the firm's chief executive initiated it.A key part of the jam was that ideas came from people working at all levels and that the ideas stood on their own merits."There's no hierarchy to this kind of creative collaboration," said Palmisano. "Whether you're a senior executive, a scientist, a business consultant or even a 13-year-old child of an IBMer, everyone gets to be heard."A veteran of corporate brainstorming agrees."Our experience is that good ideas can come from just about anywhere within the organization," said Charles Holland, president of QualPro, a business consultancy based in Knoxville, Tenn., that regularly employs brainstorming. "We keep coming up with instances where the best ideas come from people low in an organization, the ones doing the actual work."This can offend the graduate-level engineers and technical people, but we've seen it again and again."`Great morale builder'Another upside, Holland said, is that "it's a great morale builder. People feel part of the team and support the work, even when their ideas don't get adopted, because they got to supply their ideas."There may be some downside to IBM's project, said Scott Stern an associate professor of management and strategy at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management."You can't get 53,000 people to sign nondisclosure agreements," Stern said. "So there's a danger that by revealing your emerging technologies and possible applications to so many people, someone else could take the ideas and develop them.