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."

Comments

Sounds Good In Theory

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Sounds Good In Theory

[Joining Yet Again]

There is only one way to have a significant say in what any company does: owning it.

To think you have any influence in a company which might show you the door in 10 minutes is just part of the silly modern promise of worker freedom.

If you want business freedom, own your own company, or join a co-operative.

Does IBM Still Have Workers?

[CodeBuster]

I thought they fired all of them and replaced them with robots.

Re:Does IBM Still Have Workers?

[LordWabbit2]

I thought they fired all of them and replaced them with Indians.

It turns out that disc golf...

[Michael Woodhams]

... 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.)

Sounds more like a mockery

[mysidia]

"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.

Re:Sounds more like a mockery

[whydavid]

Ignorant much?

IBM has, according to their website, 434,246 employees. So much for a small employee population...unless you meant 'a small country' or 'a small state.'

In any case, if you even took the time to read the 4-sentence blurb, you would see that they did this with 500 employees at their research center, which would still give 5 times your estimate of '10,000 or so.'

And I don't see why it would make any sense for IBM to give every person $10,000. The idea is to ferret out popular/worthwhile ideas. That doesn't really work if one or two people can fund it, as any of the examples could have been if each had $10,000 to spend.

And finally, your idea of profit sharing with regards to the selected ideas only works if the idea is meant to have some immediate financial impact. Procuring a 3D printer might not directly lead to financial results, but it may help someone rapidly prototype something that becomes a million dollar idea. You will never be able to measure the financial contribution made by that 3D printer, so why bother? Similarly, a disc golf course might provide some intangible stress relief, and employees may be a little more productive as a result, but how are you going to quantify that? IBM is pretty good at identifying business opportunity on their own...that clearly isn't the point of this exercise.

Re:Sounds more like a mockery

[mysidia]

The problem I have with this is crowdfunding is about big ideas; Procuring a 3D printer is not a big idea. When was the last time you saw a kickstarter project with someone asking for help buying themselves a personal 3D printer?

A big idea is something more like "go to the moon and start working on an interplanetary computer network" or "build a supercomputer"

You will never be able to measure the financial contribution made by that 3D printer, so why bother?

Sure you will. The practice is to imagine two worlds: one world with the 3D printer, and one world without the 3D printer. Then estimate the outcome, and how revenues and costs change, without having purchased the 3D printer, to figure the opportunity cost.

By the way; if the 3D printer was required for a $3billion in profit generating project to first get off the ground; then the opportunity cost of having not purchased the 3D printer was ~ $3bn.

The assumption is the project would not have happened at all if not for the 3D printer.

You can also entertain worlds where that was not the case ---- you can assume the idea would occur anyways, but implementation would be delayed, or you'd realize at a later event that a 3D printer (or other method) was needed; in which case, you would need to figure out how much the costs go up, or how much the revenues go down by not having the 3D printer at that time.

It's tedious to work, and the math only worth doing later if the project turned out to be obviously valuable --- but it's not intractible.

That did not start at IBM

[Taco Cowboy]

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.

Survey

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Stupid

[afidel]

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.