High Tech Crowdsoucing Driving Innovation and Opportunity

Prepared by Ryan Coleman and Kevin Walsh

The Global Catalyst Group revisits the reoccurring topic of crowdsourcing. Our guest for the call, Liam Cleaver is the Program Director of IBM’s Innovation Jams. Liam will share with us the background, technology and theory behind IBM Jams. Innovation Jams are online brainstorming events hosted over the course of 72 hours and synthesis the ideas, thoughts, recommendations and opportunities of thousands of participants across the world.  IBM hosted Jams that incorporated over 300,000 members of its global workforce and has dedicated more than $100 million to fund the development of ideas present from Innovation Jam  Events.

IBM’s InnovationJam 2008 took crowdsourcing to its truest form by “tapping the collaborative insight of leading thinkers from thousands of companies to help advance the vision of IBM’s CEO Study, “The Enterprise of the Future.” The event hosted 90,000 login’s and over 32,000 post over a 90 hour period.
Read more at: http://www.ibm.com/ibm/jam/

Objectives:

• Discover the fundamentals behind IBM’s Innovation Jams
• Explore the intrinsic benefit of companies hosting events like Jams on a) innovation and b) corporate culture
• Identify key attributes of successful crowdsoucing and corporate wide brainstorming sessions (Risk associated with/Opportunities/Key Management Principles)

Guiding questions:

• How can we translate internal or corporate crowdsourcing into consumer driven innovation?
• What opportunities exist by innovating through crowdsourcing in the high tech industry?
• Based on previous conversations and insight into IBM’s Innovation Jams, what business opportunities present themselves through platform creation to facilitate crowdsourced innovation in emerging industries (3D Printing, Nano Tech, Bio-Medicine)
• Based on the IBM case study what key lessons surfaced as essential to creating innovation programs like InnovationJams.

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