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IBM Uses Internal Kickstarters To Pick Projects
alphadogg writes "IBM is readying its fourth internal Kickstarter-like crowdfunding effort over the past year or so to inspire employees to innovate and collaborate, often across departments and the globe. According to IBM Research member Michael Muller, IBM has embraced the crowdfunding model popularized in recent years by Kickstarter, Indiegogo and hundreds of other such platforms that match up creators and financial backers from among the masses. But IBM's 'behind-the-firewall' form of crowdfunding, for which Muller has coined the term 'enterprise crowdfunding,' is unique in that it isn't open to the public. In an experiment held in the third quarter of last year, 500 Watson Research Center employees were each given $100 to invest exclusively in colleagues' proposals, which ranged from procuring a 3D printer to setting up a disc golf course to recording and sharing seminars."
so IBM won't pay for employees whimps.
Sounds like a good way to make employees feel they have some say in what the company does. I wish more places did this, unless they simply scrap the data afterwards and management vetoes the winning projects.
All your idea are belong to us!
I thought they fired all of them and replaced them with robots.
... involve neither putters nor 3.5" floppies. I'm so disappointed.
(For those who share my former ignorance, it is getting a frisbee to a distant target with as few throws as possible.)
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
"employees were each given $100 to invest exclusively in colleagues' proposals, which ranged from procuring a 3D printer to setting up a disc golf course to recording and sharing seminars."
Given how small the employee population of a company like IBM is; $100 per person might add up to 10,000 or so. Talk about guaranteeing any significant idea, such as a new product could never be sufficiently funded by this.
It sounds like they are remiss about the whole kickstarter thing. If they were serious about it, they'd have at least $10,000 per person for each employee to intelligently divide among projects -- with some sort of reward for folks supporting winning projects; in the form of a revenue share, E.g. 10% of revenue reserved for winners; allocated among employees that supported in proportion to each employee's contribution.
All your idea are belong to us!
The first time I encountered the above phenomenon I was at my sophomore year.
During one of the many brainstorming sessions we had with our mentor I blurb out (at that time) a very outrageous idea. The idea was so outrageous that even the mentor was visibly taken aback somewhat.
5 months down the road that mentor applied for a patent based on that outrageous idea of mine, and of course, my name wasn't appearing anywhere in the patent application.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Umm, it's not crowdfunding. It's a survey or poll. Like what do you want for the break room? Ping pong table? Cappuccino machine? Etc.
You know, stuff people have been doing for forever to get information on what a group wants.
It's missing all the elements of crowdfunding. Like the actual funding from the crowd.
It won't work because people cannot do anything else with the money and thus will spend it on some project. They will not choose the best project as they don't have any particular incentive to do so. They will rather spend the money on the project of the people they are friends with.
To make it work I would propose the following changes:
- Employees have to invest real money (e.g., from their salaries). Investments are, of course, completely voluntarily. Investments could be limited to e.g., $1000 per employee per year. The important thing here is that the employee has to invest real money that she/he could use otherwise, so they will only do so for projects that they really believe in.
- IBM would increase the investment to e.g., 10x the value the employee invested. This would ensure that there is a boost to what an employee can achieve with her/his investment.
- The employee gets a bonus if the idea turns into a (viable) business project / product. The bonus could be e.g., 10x the value invested. This would ensure that the employees have an incentive to participate in such projects and that they really choose projects they think are viable rather than the projects of their friends. There could be additional factors, such as a 100x boost if the project not only succeeds but really takes off.
How to choose the "boost factor"? Well, if 10% of projects succeed on average, then the boost factor should be bigger than (1 / 10%) to ensure that investors get on average their investment back (and thus are motivated to participate).
"46% of the employees involved actually did “make a mark on the database” by investing, viewing projects, volunteering to participate in projects or taking other actions"
That's right, less than half of all employees even looked at this. And these are research people that are always interested in the latest ideas.
At $100 they've wasted 99% of the funds on making people choose, when I was at Cisco anything under $10k could be put on a corporate credit card because it cost $68 in personnel time to cut a PO with approvals, I can't see how this model can possibly be effective with such small amounts of money unless it's a testbed to research the concept for bigger corporate-wide use.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Is furloughing their server employees how they're paying for the projects?
Have heard maybe a German bank was doing something like this, but havent come across other examples
I'd pay good money for that alone..
Shouldn't that be rupees?
So they furloughed a huge number of US employees so they could give non-productive eggheads money to come up with something IBM bigwigs can fatten their purses with. Too bad IBM has no clue how to do modern software or hardware development so they will just ruin whatever they come up with like thy do with every company they acquire. A slowly dying dinosaur, it should be put out of it's and our misery.
I had assumed that I was going to read about an internal system IBM uses to determine which projects to pursue, that operates similar to "Kickstarter" but where the donors offer their professional services as employees of IBM toward projects proposed by various members of various departments.
I think a system like that would work if each user had to spend "priority" in some fashion. For instance, you could be doled out 5 priority tags to attach to a particular skill tag which you will in turn offer toward a project that shares or requests the involvement of that skill tag.
You would whore yourself out, 5-4-3-2-1.
Then if the project you tagged with the top priority (5 we'll say) falls through from lack of support, then you will find yourself fulfilling the duties you pledged with the next priority down. And so on down the line until you're a failure because you didn't pick any winners.
Then the successfully "funded" projects would go into overtime, and the people who haven't "found work" would be able to tag themselves onto the second echelon of support, like a reserve or a bullpen, or even (if the project can find use for them) as active participants.
Instead "well uh they gave them all uhh $100, uhhhh, you can buy a car with that, or uhhhhhh a candy bar even!"
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
This is only within IBM Research division if you RTFA. IBM Research puts out some amazing work, but they represent a very small percentage of the total company size. In the example given, it was pilot group of 500 users at the Watson Research site ... 500 / 434,246 employees = 0.115% of the total IBM workforce.
Take the whole IBM utilizing Kickstarter for internal projects with a grain of salt, its definitely limited.
Ah, because the old business model of 'suck the lives out of your employees and then fire them indiscriminately' needed tweaking, then? Interesting.