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IBM's Innovative Jam

IBM has created a reputation as being a quality innovator in a fast$-$paced industry. One approach used to spawn innovation was the IBM Innovation Jam, where IBM gathered data and ideas from thousands of individuals within and outside the organization. This resulted in the emergence of numerous new innovative ideas and the launch of new businesses.

Managing innovation within a corporation is difficult since companies must find the appropriate level of incremental versus radical innovation investments. IBM struggled with focusing too much on incremental innovations in an industry that demanded radical innovations. To spawn creativity and ideas, IBM launched the Innovation Jam to gather ideas from employees, partners, and other individuals.

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IBM is one of the best$-$known corporations in the world, but the company saw a major challenge for the firm. Although IBM had great ability to do basic scientific research and owned the rights to over $40,000$ patents, it had struggled to translate its patented knowledge into marketable products. Also, it had built a reputation with investors as a firm with incremental product development, not the reputation needed in dynamic technological markets. Crowdsourcing was one choice to move IBM forward in a bold way.

In $2006,$ IBM hosted an Innovation Jam, an open event that involved $150,000$ IBM employees, family members, business partners, clients, and university researchers. The jam took place over two $72-$hour sessions. Participants from over $100$ countries jammed for $24$ hours a day over three days. The discussions were organized around $25$ technologies in six broad categories. While the jam discussions were rich in content, it was a challenge for IBM to pull meaningful data from them. The $24-$hour format meant that no single moderator could follow any discussion, and the volume of posts to the discussion threads left IBM with a huge amount of data to wade through. The discussions yielded $46,000$ potential business ideas. To make sense of the data, IBM organized the discussion threads using sophisticated text analysis software and had a team of $50$ managers read through the organized data. Using data from the first session, the managers identified $31$ "big ideas." They further explored these $31$ ideas in the second jam session. IBM then used another set of $50$ global managers to review the discussions from the jam. Teams of managers focused on related groups of ideas, such as health care and the environment.

IBM's managers saw the jam as serving three purposes. First, it gave individuals both inside and outside IBM who already had big ideas a forum in which to share their vision with top managers. Second, it gave individuals with smaller ideas a venue to link up with others with related ideas, resulting in larger major initiatives. For example, individuals who had ideas