Supernova 2007: because technology is everyone's business

Thursday, June 22, 2006

Perspective: Linda Sanford, IBM

Linda Sanford, Sr. VP, IBM, answers the question: How does IBM drive innovation internally? (Text is not verbatim.)

My responsibility it to help transform ourselves, which is a continuous process. How do you take a 330,000 person organization and make it relevant, a source of ongoing innovation, internally and across our partner networks.

Recently we conducted a CEO study among clients around the world to get what they thought was most important in the 21st century market. No. 1 was innovation, which would drive their sustainable profitability.

We also undertook a Global Innovation Outlook sessions, bringing people together across disciplines to talk about how to apply innovation to specific topics. One set of observations on the future of the enterprise.

From our own perspective, we have a broader definition of innovation. It’s not just inventing new products and services that we need. It’s the sum of invention and insight – the application of innovation to solving business problems. It’s about new business models, new processes, new cultures and behaviors, and it has social responsibility implications.

There are 6 degrees of innovation:

6. It’s about the endeavor, not the brand.
Today, graduates look at not the job, but the project, who they’ll work with, how much responsibility they’ll have. You have to bring the right set of skills, passion and expertise together to enable people to innovate. Teams form to complete a project, then disperse. Allow people to self select what they work on, solve the problem, then disband.

5. It’s how you play the game.
The skills you get in education programs aren’t hitting the mark for what we need in business. You have to make decisions on dispersed information, collaborate with people you never meet. The leader of the 21st century will come out of the gaming generation. They bring a set of skills that you master when you play the game. How do you bring that into the workforce? You need to let people build skill sets and educate themselves in the workplace.

4. Talking about my reputation.
In a free agent world, you need to measure the value of an individual and decide if they will bring value to the enterprise. When you let the community evaluate the reputation of the individual, that will impact employer-employee relationship. How we assess experience and skills is changing.

3. From not invented here to invented here not.
We asked CEOs what would be the major sources of innovation. They said they saw more innovation coming from outside their company than from within. It’s important for them to open their borders. Those businesses that collaborate more are more profitable from a financial performance perspective. Innovation outside the four walls can lead to more profitable success. Leaders who embrace that will most successful.

2. Balance is beautiful.
In a collaborative world, we need to rethink old 20th century paradigms. Intellectual property policies protecting the rights of the creator but still allowing open collaboration. Part of what we’ve done is pledge patents to a patents commons, and open patents around web documents and services in healthcare and education. Some IP needs to be protected in a traditional way. Others needs to be non-traditional, but give the opportunity to build a proprietary advantage on too of it.

1. Collaborating to change the world.
Web 2.0 provides us with the computing power to apply to some of the world’s problems. We’ve been participating in the World Community Grid, which is linked to different devices. When your PC is idle, you can give that idle time to solving these big problems – e.g., AIDs, the human genome, predicting natural disasters.

Technology is an enabler. But it takes personal leadership to deal with issues like good vs. bad. It takes human imagination, and human touch, to ensure that we deliver innovation that matters.