WebKnowHow Tuesday, November 14, 2006; 02:50 AM
IBM Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Samuel J. Palmisano announced that the company will invest $100 million over the next
two years to pursue ten new businesses generated by InnovationJam, an
unprecedented experiment in collaborative innovation held earlier this
year.
The largest on-line brainstorming session ever, InnovationJam brought
together more than 150,000 people from 104 countries, including IBM
employees, family members, universities, business partners and clients
from 67 companies. Over two 72-hour sessions, participants posted more
than 46,000 ideas as they explored IBM’s most
advanced Research technologies and considered their application to
real-world problems and emerging business opportunities.
“Collaborative innovation models require you
to trust the creativity and intelligence of your employees, your clients
and other members of your innovation network,”
said Palmisano. “We opened up our labs, said
to the world, ‘Here are our crown jewels, have
at them’. The Jam -- and programs like it –
are greatly accelerating our ability to innovate in meaningful ways for
business and society.”
Speaking today at a global “town hall”
meeting in front of more than 6,000 IBM China employees, Palmisano
revealed a portfolio of near-, mid- and long-term initiatives that will
require new models of development and co-creation to bring to market.
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Smart Healthcare Payment Systems: Overhauling healthcare
payment and management systems through the use of small personal
devices (such as smart cards) that will automatically trigger
financial transactions, the processing of insurance claims and the
updating of electronic health records.
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Simplified Business Engines: Developing and bringing to market
an intuitive, easy-to-use and pre-packaged set of Web 2.0 services and
blade server offerings that allow small and mid-size businesses to
easily tap applications customized to their own specific business
needs.
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Real-time Translation Services: Offering advanced, real-time
translation capabilities across major languages as a service for
high-potential applications, industries and environments, such as
healthcare, government and travel and transportation.
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Intelligent Utility Networks: Increasing the reliability and
manageability of the world’s power grids by
building in “intelligence”
in the form of real-time monitoring, control, analysis, simulation and
optimization.
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3D Internet: Partnering with others to take the best of virtual
worlds and gaming environments to build a seamless, standards-based 3D
Internet -- the next platform for global commerce and day-to-day
business operations.
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“Digital Me”:
Creating a secure, user-friendly service that simplifies storage,
management and long-term access to the deluge of personal content that
people accumulate (digital photos, videos, music, health and financial
records, personal identification documents, files, etc.).
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Branchless Banking for the Masses: Enabling existing and new
financial institutions to profitably provide basic banking services
(checking, savings, payments, microlending) to often remote,
inaccessible populations in fast-growing emerging markets.
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Integrated Mass Transit Information System: Establishing on
demand systems for integrating, managing and disseminating real-time
data for all of a municipality’s or region’s
transit systems, optimizing buses, rail, highways, waterways and
airlines.
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Electronic Health Record System: Creating a standards-based
infrastructure to support automatic updating of, and pervasive access
to, personal healthcare records and the integrating of patient data
with global payer/provider transaction systems.
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“Big Green”
Innovations: Launching a new business unit in IBM that will focus
on applying the company’s advanced
expertise and technologies to emerging environmental opportunities,
such as advanced water modeling, water filtration via nanotechnology
and efficient solar power systems.
Consistent with the open, collaborative nature of innovation, IBM
intends to partner with multiple clients and universities to bring these
ideas to market quickly.
InnovationJam builds on a highly successful series of internal “jams”
IBM has held with employees annually since 2001, as well as the company’s
collaborative Global Innovation Outlook process, which brings together
hundreds of organizations worldwide to identify key innovation
opportunities in select business and societal areas. The company is
currently in negotiations with more then three dozen companies and
organizations to provide Jam offerings and services as a result of this
year’s program.
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