International Business Machines Corp’s (IBM) three-day InnovationJam 2008 yesterday generated 3,909 postings in the first 12 hours on proposed innovative business ideas from employees and more than 900 select companies and institutions worldwide.
Supply chain, manage change and global integration were the most talked about themes, while interests, failure and utilities were the least discussed.
Netherlands-based IMB-er Peter Korsten, host of “The REAL top three factors for partnering success,” received replies for possible solutions such as educating both the technical and the functional teams so that they are on the same page, making improvements in IBM’s cross-country and cross-company exchange programs, as well as creating clear incentives to empower teams on both sides.
“We call this kind of conversation a Jam. It is IBM’s Web 2.0 tool for business collaboration — a massively scaled online discussion centered on strategic, business-critical issues,” Sophia Tong (童至祥), IBM’s country general manager, told a media briefing yesterday.
Ten local companies and more than 500 IBM staffers in the country, representing a 25 percent participation rate, logged on to the Web site. The registered Taiwanese companies and institutions include Delta Electronics Inc (台達電子), ZyXel Communications Corp (合勤科技) and the Industrial Technology Research Institute (工研院).
IBM initiated IBM Jam in 2001. In 2006’s Jam, the resulting ideas were dubbed “Next Five in Five,” referring to the next five innovations that will come in the next five years.
More than US$100 million (NT$3.23 billion) were invested in 2006 and last year to pursue the new businesses generated by 2006’s InnovationJam.
Participants at IBM’s annual Jam sessions sign a waiver allowing all of their ideas posted on the site to be public intellectual property. The winning ideas get funded; however, the contributors are not rewarded directly.
Without this alignment of incentives, IBM’s InnovationJam is a far cry from Google’s inherent strong culture of innovation and experimentation.
At Google, engineers are encouraged to take 20 percent of their time to develop new products or services, or to provide enhancements to current offerings.
This continuous “20 percent time” innovation environment often results in new beta offerings provided to the public at the Google Labs Web site.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day