IBM’s $100 Million Brainstorm [The Next Net]

  Brainstorms at INDEX: Views 
  Originally uploaded by Jacob Bøtter.

At IBM, brainstorming is now a company wide affair.  Over the past few months, more than 150,000 employees, business partners, and clients have been coming up with new business ideas for IBM to pursue in a series of "Innovation Jams" and smaller face-to-face meetings.  They’ve boiled the ocean  down from 46,000 initial ideas and postings to ten, and IBM CEO Sam Palmisano is about to announce the final winners from a corporate event in China (and on Second Life simultaneously—it’s the trendy thing to do).  He is putting $100 million into the final ten ideas in the hopes that a few may turn into billion-dollar businesses. Here is where he is placing his bets:     

Smart Healthcare Payment Systems:  Speeding healthcare payments by connecting patients, doctors, and insurance companies through smart cards.

Simplified Business Engines: A suite of  Web 2.0 business apps (running on blade servers) for small businesses.

Real-time Translation Services: Seamless speech-to-text-to-speech software that can translate one language to another like a Babble Fish (based on IBM Research’s impressive MASTOR technology).

Intelligent Utility Networks:  Bringing network management and monitoring to the utility grid. 

3D
Internet:  Build a technology platform for virtual worlds so that
businesses can conduct meetings, presentations, focus groups, product
demos or run virtual stores in a "standards-based 3D Internet" (sort of
like Second Life).

“Digital Me”: Online storage and management
for personal digital photos, videos, music, files, identification
documents, and health and financial records.

Branchless
Banking for the Masses: Sell technology to financial institutions that
lets them provide basic banking services to the unbanked in remote
parts of India, China, and other fast-growing emerging markets.

Integrated
Mass Transit Information System: Back-end systems for connecting and
managing real-time data for all of a region’s transit systems, and
coordinating among buses, rail, highways, waterways and airlines.

Electronic
Health Record System: Create a central repository for health records
that accepts data from any provider, integrates with the health payment
system (see above), and offers personal healthcare records to consumers
and their doctors. 

“Big Green” Innovations: A new business
unit that will focus on emerging environmental opportunities, such as
advanced water modeling (looking for water like today we look for oil),
nanotech-based water filtration and efficient solar power systems.

Many
of these are not particularly new ideas, but they represent big
opportunities nonetheless for Big Blue.  And if they can make a
billion-dollar business out of one or two of these ideas, so could one or two
clever entrepreneurs.  (Ahem, that would be you).