March 11 BostonCHI Innovation Talk: Michael Muller on Crowdfunding Inside the Enterprise

An IBM Research talk,  part of the monthly BostonCHI speaker series

When: Tuesday, March 11, 2014, 6:30 PM to 9 PM

Where: 1 Rogers Street Auditorium, IBM Cambridge

Register here: http://www.bostonchi.org/

Crowdfunding Inside the Enterprise: New opportunities for collaborative innovation

Michael Muller will walk us through a collaborative experiment led by Werner Geyer, Todd Soule, and Michael, all of IBM Research, Cambridge, and John Wafer of IBM, Dublin.

Crowdfunding is a relatively recent Internet phenomenon, in which an innovator can propose a project and solicit investments from the public. More than 450 crowdfunding sites are now in operation around the world, such as Kickstarter, Indiegogo, Rockethub, Kiva, and Donors Choose. Successfully-funded projects span much of human aspiration and intention, including charity, creativity, community service, new business initiatives, and financial rate-of-return.

We conducted our own crowdfunding experiment inside IBM. Our project, I Fund IT (previously “1×5″), has been run four times —  in two research groups, and twice in an IT organization. Outcomes went well beyond our original expectations, and include: employee proposals that addressed diverse individual and group needs; very high participation rates; inter-departmental and international collaboration; the discovery of many previously unknown collaborators; and the development of goals and motivations based on collective concerns at all levels of project groups and communities.

We discovered that moving crowdfunding “behind the firewall” is transformative, highlighting opportunities for new forms of collaboration among employees and between employees and upper management. We conclude with our current understanding of success factors, best practices, and implications for theory and design.

About Michael Muller

Michael works in the Collaborative User Experience group of IBM Research, which recently became part of the new Cognitive Computing organization within IBM Research. His work focuses on metrics and analytics for enterprise social software applications, and emergent social phenomena in social software. Earlier IBM work involved activity-centric computing and communities of practice. Michael is an internationally recognized expert in participatory design and analysis. His work in this area includes the development of methods (CARD, PICTIVE, participatory heuristic evaluation) and theory (ethnocritical heuristics). Michael is an IBM Master Inventor.

More from the Innovation Lab at IBM Connect 2014

One more day to see the next wave of cutting-edge technology from IBM Research. 

Stop by the Innovation Lab in Asia 3, open 9:00 - 12:00 on Thursday. Get answers to these questions...

Who is the most suitable expert for me?

Inbal Ronen , Haifa Lab

Expertise location is a major task performed in enterprises. This demo will present expertise location and advanced features of IBM Connections and other skill related sources in the enterprise. In additional to topic based expertise location, we will show how to identify similar experts when the returned expert is unreachable or busy.  Similarity is based on similar expertise (similar skills, similar social activity, participating in the same blog, being members of the same communities) and personal attribute similarity (similar job title, same country, or same organization). For each recommended similar expert we will show evidence of why the person is identified as similar in the context of the expertise topic. We will also show additional features that facilitate expertise search.

How can I create the best team for the job?

Ana Paula Appel, Brazil Lab

The well-known phrase “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” is applicable when assembling an effective team to solve a particular problem. A team formation problem consists of forming a team from a large set of candidates such that the resulting team is best suited to perform an assignment. For instance, a team of available nurses and physicians to perform in an emergency room in a hospital should be chosen carefully, as they need to cover several skills, have the ability to work together, and perform as an efficient team. Social network analytics with optimization techniques allow us to find the best team to perform a required task. Here, we show that our system works for several scenarios, such as health insurance, businesses, and distance learning.

How will a visualiziation help me understand correlations in risk and compliance?

Jamie Rasmussen, Cambridge Lab

The goal of this work is to investigate interactive visual analytics for Governance, Risk Management, and Compliance (GRC).  GRC data in IBM OpenPages is based upon defined business processes and risks along with controls for those risks. Several visualizations have been created, including a graph-based GRC object representation that can be used to spot structural anomalies in the data and a visualization of a Monte Carlo simulation showing the impact of uncontrolled risks.

What's the trick to effectively manage client relationships in a huge company?

Vagner Santana, Brazil Lab

Customer-facing employees in large, distributed organizations often face the challenge of losing track of the customer relationship big picture. Although such individual interactions are the building blocks of customer relationships, the complexity of maintaining the big picture greatly increases as the number of touch-points to the customers increase. The lack of task coordination, awareness, or collaboration across teams is one of the main problems affecting the client relationship and thus the client experience. Our demo supports creating an effective “One IBM View” by providing coordination and awareness for distributed teams. It is built on IBM Connections and employs new data and visual analytics for analyzing and representing critical activities with customers.

 

IBM Research Innovation Lab at IBM Connect 2014

It's all about the people...

Every year at the annual IBM Connect Conference (formerly Lotusphere), the IBM Innovation Lab showcases the future. It provides a first-hand glimpse into the cutting-edge technology being developed at IBM Research labs around the world.

If you are attending the conference, make it a point to visit the lab in Asia 3at the Dolphin. Share ideas with IBM researchers and see their work as it unfolds. This year, the lab is focusing on three areas: Smarter Workforce, Visual Analytics, and Co-Inventing with Customers.

Here is our latest thinking about enabling your workforce, by way of four IBM research demos being shown in the lab:

Talent Planning Analytics: Predicting the Skill Needs in a Dynamic Marketplace

Aleksandra Mojsilovic, Predictive Modeling and Optimization

Understanding market demand and client needs, and then translating that into the right skills, is critical to business success. Do we have the right skills to support our projects and service delivery? How can we most effectively support our internal business processes and back office operations? Is our sales force aligned with our clients? Do our sellers have the right skills and expertise to sell our products? Our prototype will demonstrate several predictive analytics capabilities to support a range of tactical and strategic talent planning needs of an organization.

Talent Retention Analytics: Using Predictive Analytic Insights to Improve Employee Engagement

Shubir Kapoor, Business Analytics Software and Services

As difficult as it has become to locate top performers, keeping them on board is proving to be an even greater challenge. How can we proactively identify which employees are at high risk of leaving? Can we determine the characteristics of these employees to better understand the reason for attrition? How can we integrate the predictive results with compensation, learning, succession planning, and performance management systems so that decisions are made with precision? How can we improve employee engagement, retain the best and brightest, ensure compensation is competitive, and let top performers know there is a career path available? It all starts with understanding the patterns that are hidden in the data. See our demo and find out more.

Understanding Employee Voice

Casey Dugan, Cognitive User Experience

Employee feedback is a critical component of successful decision-making in today’s complex business environment. Making sense of that feedback and reacting to it can be challenging. We're showing various technologies and approaches for understanding the voice of your employees, from product offerings to research prototypes. These tools form an employee engagement suite that can provide workforce insights - from traditional surveys to real-time understanding through social media analytics.

Engagement Analytics: Increasing Social Adoption and Business ROI 
Shiri Kremer-Davidson, Social Technologies 
Marie Wallace, Analytics Strategist, IBM Social Business
The trend toward an open, transparent, and collaborative business environment is changing how people interact across the enterprise and beyond. Social collaboration platforms generate large volumes of data about a business. However, little of this data is being leveraged to generate insights that allow a business to drive a new class of analytics-driven decision making. Our demo shows an extensible environment that uses enterprise network data to generate KPIs that measure individual impact with the goal of measuring organizational effectiveness. It also empowers individuals by helping them use social networks to optimize their own social engagement strategies and approaches. Visit the lab to learn more about the Social Dashboard you see below and how it helps employees to better understand their role in the social network.