With its eight labs and 3,200 researchers, IBM Research is the world’s largest corporate research organization. In 2006, its scientists were working on amazing new capabilities, including building an Internet that would allow shoppers to visit 3-D stores and see 3-D product demonstrations and a new software program that could perform real-time speech translation so that, for instance, words on the Middle East’s Al Jazeera news network could appear with English subtitles immediately, without the need for human translators.
IBM’s chairman at that time, Sam Palmisano, toured the labs where these projects were being developed. He was excited -- not only about the breakthroughs, but also about developing new ways to bring these things to market quickly. Palmisano thought that, given that IBM has 346,000 employees, there had to be faster ways to bring these new technologies to market.
The company decided to hold an innovation “Jam” to accelerate the launch of new technologies. The company had developed this concept back in 2001-- over the course of three days, people would seek substantive answers to questions using a group of interlinked bulletin boards and related Web pages on IBM’s intranet. Employees would address questions like “How do you work in an increasingly mobile organization.” And the idea was that people would all get to participate and be listened to while they generated valuable new ideas. From the beginning, this process engaged tens of thousands of people, and subsequent Jams helped clarify IBM’s values and improve the organization’s operations.
This Jam focused on bringing new technologies to market faster was the first of its kind. IBM had only the vaguest ideas about how to make money from most of the new technologies the scientists had demonstrated. How could they turn them into profits? IBM was demanding more from the Jam system than it had before and was seeking results more central to the company’s future. It would, as proposed, be the largest-ever online effort to advance technological innovation.
The “Innovation Jam,” as IBM called it, took place in two three-day phases in 2006. It was successful in uncovering and solving problems, and mobilizing support for new ways of using IBM technology. Over 150,000 IBM employees, family members, business partners, clients from 67 companies and university researchers took part. These people came from 104 countries, and their conversations continued 24 hours a day. Participants posted more than 46,000 ideas. They enthusiastically offered many potential money-making suggestions.
Organizers laid out key emerging technologies for participants. Web pages described 25 clusters of technologies is six broad groupings. The Web sites included mini-lectures from IBM experts on some of the technologies and demonstrations of others. Experts from the Research Division acted as online moderators to help participants understand the technologies and address customer needs.
The first phase took place in July, when the company posted information on key technologies and participants brainstormed new ways to use them. The second occurred in September, when participants refined ideas from the first phase. They clicked to a separate site where they could work on business plans for key ideas using wikis.
Not everything worked ideally. Many of the participants logged on just to look around. And there were other difficulties as well. In fact, few contributors built constructively on each other’s postings. The company organized the Jam to capture huge numbers of ideas from IBM’s network, but purposely didn’t design it to guide conversations. Therefore, there was almost never any consensus. And, naturally, the brainstorming produced many impractical or irrelevant ideas: a solar-powered toilet and vending machines selling flaxseed, for example.
New visions emerged afterward rather than during online conversations. Senior executives spent weeks sifting through tens of thousands of postings -- gigabytes of often aimless conversation. Working through the static let leaders extract key ideas, put them together into coherent business concepts, and then link them with people who could make them work.
Thus, IBM learned some paradoxical things: On the one hand, the company saw how many people throughout the organization have important strategic ideas. And it learned that online conversations and sophisticated technology can bring those ideas to bear on important societal problems and make them worth millions. But IBM also learned that people are limited in how they recognize and build on each others’ ideas online. These limitations meant that analysts and top-level managers were essential -- together with sophisticated software for combing through vast amounts of verbiage -- to making these ideas useful. Leaders found themselves identifying and nurturing good ideas -- which was often a new role -- but they still had to be the drivers of this progress.
This article is adapted from “An Inside View of IBM’s ‘Innovation Jam,’” by Osvald M. Bjelland and Robert Chapman Wood, which appeared in the Fall 2008 issue of MIT Sloan Management Review. The complete article is available at .