IBM Research is the world’s largest corporate research organization, with eight labs and 3,200 researchers in six countries. Every year Sam Palmisano, IBM Corp.’s chairman, visits its headquarters in Yorktown Heights, New York, to review progress.
When Palmisano toured the labs in early 2006, enthusiastic scientists showed him all manner of newly developed capabilities. One technology promised to forecast the weather so precisely that school districts could tell whether their town would get an inch or two more snow than their neighbors and therefore have to close school. Another project would enable the building of an Internet where shoppers could visit 3-D stores and see realistic 3-D demonstrations of products. Yet another new software program would perform real-time translation of speech so that the words on China Central Television or the Middle East’s Al Jazeera news network could appear in English underneath the speakers without human intervention.
After the demos, IBM’s Paul Horn, chief scientist, and Cathy Lasser, research chief information officer, met with Palmisano. “He was clearly very excited,” says Horn. But he was also already thinking about the next challenge — how to commercialize the breakthroughs successfully, a challenge IBM hadn’t always efficiently met. “He said, ‘Let’s come up with some novel way to get this stuff to the market more quickly. Let’s think out of the box.’ ” Palmisano felt that with 346,000... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.
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