Intrapreneurship and Corporate Venturing 393A Question of Balance
“We’re blessed with more than 300,000 of the
most innovative employees in the world,”
notes Nick Donofrio, senior vice president for
technology and innovation at IBM, “but it has-
n’t always been clear how they could share
their ideas.”
To facilitate that exchange of intrapreneur-
ial ideas, the largest information technology
company in the world sponsored what it calls
the Innovation Jam. Billed as an online brain-
storm, this 2006 event was a two-session
event at which 100,000 IBM employees, cus-
tomers, business partners, and others from
160 countries were invited to post and
respond to innovative suggestions over the
Internet. The first 72-hour session in July
2006 was devoted to generating ideas; the
second session in September was designed
to identify which of July’s ideas had the most
potential. IBM committed up to $100 million in
funding for the best ideas to emerge from this
process.
According to a 2006 Global CEO Study
conducted by IBM, more than 75 percent of
current CEOs rely on clients and business
partners to help generate innovative ideas,
while fewer than 15 percent expect those
ideas to come from inside their own organiza-
tions. “More and more businesses are realiz-
ing the importance of looking at the innova-
tion of the leading users of their products and
services as strong indicators of where their
markets are heading,” says Irving
Wladawsky-Berger, IBM’s vice president for
technical strategy and innovation.
“Collaborative innovation in general, both
inside and outside IBM, is a major objective
of our Innovation That Matters initiative.”
IBM has borrowed from the jazz tradition
to promote the exchange of ideas before. In
2001 they hosted an online jam session to
develop new business opportunities. In 2002
the topic was good management practices,
and in 2003 the subject was IBM values. But
the 2006 jam session was the company’s
largest and the first in which people outside
the company were included. It was, in the
words of IBM CRO Samuel J. Palmisano, an
opportunity in which “a technology company
takes its most valued secrets, opens them up
to the world and says, “O.K. world, you tell
us” what can be done with them.
The 2006 Innovation Jam focused on four
topics: Going Places: the transportation of
people and goods; Finance and Commerce:
secure and innovative ways to make or
invest money, purchase items, and finance
new construction; Staying Healthy: health
care and healthy living strategies, along with
their rising costs; and A Better Planet: envi-
ronmental issues, specifically energy and
water. Participants were asked to consider
these four topics in the light of six emerging
technologies: embedded intelligence
(microchips inserted in products for communi-
cation and triggering), existing insight, global
collaboration of both individuals and compa-
nies, practical supercomputing, and intelligent
IT systems.
IBM hopes this ground-breaking
Innovation Jam will lead to the creation of
innovative products and services, along with
processes—billing, paying, market research,
etc. and business models that are innovative
themselves. To get those results the compa-
ny is even willing to risk a competitor or the
media hacking into the online exchange.
“Without risk, there is no innovation,” notes
Ed Bevin, one of the chief IBM architects of
the project.
SOURCE:Adapted from Jessi Hempel, “Big Blue
Brainstorm,” Business Week, August 7, 2006 : 70; Irving
Wladawsky-Berger, “Some Personal Reflections on the
Changing Nature of Strategy.” Retrieved from the Web
August 30, 2006.
http://irvingwb.typepad.com/blog.2006/07/some_person-
al_r.html. http://www.globalinnovationjam.com, and http://domi-
no.watson.ibm.com/comm/www_innovate.nsf/pages/our-
selves.thinkplace.html.STREET STORY 10.1