A Global Exchange on Ideas Being Born
The Jam created whole new businesses and allowed people from all over the world to give input on ideas that management was already working on.
Joseph Jasinski, program director for Healthcare and Life Sciences Research at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, served in subgroups that reviewed health care-related postings. He found the power of the ideas was in how they could complement each other and complement existing schemes. He “didn’t see anything that just blew [his] mind” among the postings, but said that many were “good augmentation” to ideas already being considered. For example, IBM had long wanted to help improve health care management. Many postings offered suggestions.
IBM leaders had hoped to create standardized personal health records that would comprehensively describe a patient’s health, to be accessed securely by each health care provider that the individual visited. The personal health records would give each provider complete background on each patient from the first encounter. IBM’s biometric authentication and data standards technologies could be central to such a system. However, technology was not enough. A health record business would need to appeal to an enormous range of stakeholders.
Like almost everyone in the world, IBM employees and customers are major stakeholders in health care systems. The Jam gave them a chance to articulate ideas. IBM management had been wondering whether a personal health record should be controlled by medical professionals who would have training in what should be entered into it, or if it should be open for viewing and change by the person whose medical history was chronicled. From countries all over the world, Jammers indicated that they and their friends would want to see and be able to change their own records.
On the other hand, some ideas about how a personal health care record should work varied dramatically by country. Americans wanted a health record system to reduce medical inefficiency. The Chinese and Indians wanted it to fix flaws in their own medical systems that kept people from getting adequate care. But the Chinese and Indians also differed between themselves: The Chinese cared about tracking traditional Chinese medicine, while Indians cared about tracking nutrition.
“In the Innovation Jam, we took some ideas that we were sort of messing around with, used the Jam to get others’ thoughts and then used the post-Jam process to launch pilots,” Jasinski says. IBM launched both a personal health records business and a
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The new version may include rewarding mechinism for poster to refining the ideas at the early stage of the conversation and ready them for further inputs, identify usefullness for market and other research. Maybe they already have it, I will try it out myself