Online brainstorming plays a vital role in tech giant's research, writes Gabrielle Monaghan
Employees like to be asked by the boss about their ideas for moving the company forward, management gurus believe. But what if that company has 335,000 employees and asks not just each of them but their families and its clients to pitch in ideas? Do too many cooks spoil the broth?
IBM doesn't think so. In a bid to stimulate further innovation, the world's biggest computer-services company held the mother of all brainstorming sessions in July.
It invited employees and clients, including Boeing, Nestlé and Pfizer, to log onto a secure website and have their say. The result was 37,000 different ideas.
Since the exercise, which IBM dubbed "Innovation Jam", the tech giant has whittled down those offerings to 10 and plans to launch new products, businesses or services stemming from the marathon brainstorm by the middle of next month.
The company intends to spend $100 million (€80 million) on developing the final ideas and bringing them to market.
"We found that not only were employees really engaged and excited to have this mechanism to talk about the business, but they had really good ideas," said David Yaun, vice-president of corporate communications and global innovation at IBM.
IBM, which employs more than 3,200 people in Ireland and is celebrating 50 years here this year, is one of just many companies worldwide targeting untapped potential in a bid to drive innovation.
And no wonder. Innovation can boost a company's operating profit margin by an average of four percentage points, according to a global survey of 800 companies conducted last year by Arthur D Little. Indeed, innovators in the top 25 per cent of those companies generated 10 times more output than those in the bottom 25 per cent, the study found.
Some 40,000 people from IBM and 67 of the company's clients from 104 countries took part in the initial stage of the jam.
It was the first time that IBM included its clients in its annual global brainstorm.
In that phase, the number of people logged in from Ireland was 775, comprising not just employees but also their families, as well as IBM partners in the Republic such as Trinity College and UCD.
In August, IBM used computer and software analytics to find the ideas that came up on the website most frequently and were best received by employees.
It then flew about 50 people to New York, assigned them 1,000 website posts each and asked them to whittle down the number to a manageable size, in this case 31.
IBM said that every idea was welcome and criticism was forbidden.
However, any employee with a thunderbolt of inspiration had to be prepared for their idea to be swept up in the group and see credit being shared out among their peers.
Last month, IBM posted the 31 ideas onto its intraweb again and asked employees to comment on them.
It provided a specific set of questions to guide the discussion, based on criteria such as uniqueness, readiness for market, and possible partners for the product or service.
Senior IBM managers are currently examining the results of the process and selecting ideas for development.
"Any of the ideas that come out of the jam are open for any of our participating companies to develop," Yaun said. "However, as host of all this, we are getting access to all these ideas and we have a lot better insight into which innovations are most market-ready because we have a heads-up on the technologies that are under development worldwide."
The electronic brainstorming sessions revolved around particular topics of discussion, ranging from how to reinvent rail travel for the 21st century and setting up infrastructure to manage health records to ways of creating biometric-intelligent passports to help counteract terrorism.
IBM is reviewing how different the ideas about biometric passports submitted during the Innovation Jam are from existing work already under way at IBM Zurich Labs and elsewhere, according to Yaun.
"The inclusion of this idea in the Jam reflects a desire to see if we can significantly enhance our thinking using this technique," he said.
If the idea is successful, "we would partner with others and a slew of government organisations. We're finding that a lot of remarkable things are possible when you bring different organisations together".
Yuan has been putting programmes in place at IBM for the last four years as he strives to enable every employee, or "IBMer" as they are known within the company, to become an innovator.
The programmes are designed to include clients, universities and government leaders to help increase IBM's chances of innovation.
The executive was in Dublin earlier this month for IBM's Global Innovation Outlook, which assembles about 250 "thought leaders" every four to six months from the business world, government organisations, academic institutions, non-government organisations and venture capital houses.
The aim of the meeting is to discuss the future of innovation in a specific field that spans business and society, such as healthcare or the environment.
In partnership with the participating organisations, IBM often invests in some of the opportunities that arise out of these meetings.
Innovation is increasingly important to the company, known as Big Blue, since it sold its personal computer unit to the Chinese enterprise Lenovo last year.
While IBM still makes some hardware, such as the servers that connect computer networks, its main business these days is managing computer systems for big companies and writing software.
IBM, which now describes itself as a worldwide leader in innovation, is on the cusp of introducing new forms of collaboration and idea generation in research and development, Yaun believes.
Ireland looks set to continue to play a significant role in IBM's R&D. The computer company announced at the end of September that it would set up a European venture capital centre and an innovation centre on its campus in Mulhuddart, Co Dublin.
That's on top of the €46 million IBM pledged in July to invest over the next three years in Mulhuddart.
"When people think about IBM, we want them to think about innovations we brought to market, our products, and our social policies. We believe that is part of our brand," Yuan said.
