IBM Explores New Frontiers in Collaborative Innovation

If necessity is the mother of invention, then diversity is the engine of innovation. And with a workforce that numbers 350,000 across 170 countries, we at IBM are fortunate to have a mother lode of diversity to mine. Gender, culture, race, and geography bring immense variation in life experiences, as do employee skill sets. IBM Research has approximately 3,200 engineers and scientists at eight labs in six countries. They make up a formidable force for solving specific problems. Yet what's still "problematic," even for a group as large and diverse as this, is knowing which problems to solve. And that meta-problem is one reason InnovationJam, held in the summer of 2006, came about. Like the jazz improvisation sessions they are named for, jams are designed to bring together people whose paths might otherwise never cross and to encourage them to create ideas they couldn't produce individually. They are moderated, open forums where a large group can engage in an online discussion for a concentrated time period. Using specially developed moderation and data mining techniques, they provide ways to surface, cultivate, and discuss new ideas-ways to collaborate on developing those ideas and drive innovation. A Heritage of Collaboration IBM has a number of ways for bringing our visionaries together with our stakeholders: Our first-of-a-kind program, which started in 1995, our Industry Solution Labs, our research consulting program-have all played a role in taking our people from labs to client sites, where scientific and commercial challenges meet. For years we have presented our annual Global Technology Outlook (GTO) to business leaders for discussion, feedback and refinement. Since 2004, we have been using Global Innovation Outlook (GIO) events to collaborate even more interactively with leaders in academia, business and government around major societal issues that IBM can help address. Participants are selected for their expertise, accomplishments and influence. While these programs have involved a portion of our research staff, InnovationJam, by contrast, engaged our entire research organization with a diverse extended community-IBM employees of every description, along with IBM family members, clients and business partners-all over the world. Our scientists had a unique opportunity to test and validate ideas with a microcosm of end-users representing almost every demographic. Collaboration Through Jamming Beginning with WorldJam in 2001, IBM has used jams to involve its employees in exploration and problem-solving. ValuesJam in 2003 gave IBM's workforce the opportunity to re-animate and state in contemporary terms the core values that IBM has lived by for nearly 100 years. In 2006, IBM decided to use the jam approach for shaping its innovation agenda. CEO Sam Palmisano kicked off the three-day event with a pledge to seed 10 new IBM businesses with investments totaling $100 million. More than 150,000 people from 104 countries and 67 companies participated! In opening the ideation aperture, InnovationJam went for breadth of experience rather than credentials or depth of expertise. Participants selected topics of interest to them regardless of their job roles. Before "opening the virtual doors," however, we felt it was important to familiarize participants with a basic introduction to current research projects. We asked everyone who registered to complete an interactive tutorial that showed new technology "building blocks" emerging from our labs. We requested that they incorporate these building blocks, wherever possible, into their brainstorming, and many did just that. The heterogeneity of discussion threads was striking. In a discussion around the concept of water conservation for example, some participants in India described ingenious systems used to collect rainwater in their home communities. They joined into discussions, asynchronously, with U. …