Jamming on Innovation: An Interview with Liam Cleaver

IBM has been conducting "Jams" for 10 years now. A Jam is an intense, large-scale, online discussion about an issue that matters. Jams have been sponsored to engage employees about corporate values, strategy implementation, and innovation, among other topics. In this interview, Liam Cleaver, Director, Workforce Transformation, at IBM, discusses Jams, how they differ from other forms of large-scale problem solving, and the critical success factors for running Jam-type events. JE: You've been doing Jams for a long time and have a lot of experience with them in a lot of different contexts. There are a lot of things that people may associate with Jams from the world of crowdsourcing and idea management, but I think that they're somewhat different. Perhaps you could start by reviewing the basic idea of a Jam with an orientation toward what might be of interest to practitioners. LC: I appreciate that ability to make that distinction [between crowdsourcing and IBM's Jams]. In the last couple years, with the explosion of social media, there have been many approaches to social networking. Most of these are geared toward what I would call ongoing collaboration or ideation. There's certainly tremendous value in that, in connecting employees across regions and across geographies to share best practices. It leverages the scale of the enterprise and makes absolute sense. And in their personal lives, many people are very familiar with tools like Facebook and Twitter. So often when I get asked what a Jam is, the people I'm chatting with have one of those notions in mind--either ongoing collaboration that they use within their companies or the purely personal perspective of an ongoing communication with people they choose to be friends with, like on Facebook. Jams predate these and have a bit of a different focus. They really started as an experiment for us back in 2001, so we've been jamming for 10 years now. Jams started at IBM after the company had executed a turnaround, and Mr. Gerstner, our CEO at that time, was very much focused on how to collectively move forward. Collectively move forward is the key phrase here. He wanted to find ways that we could become "one IBM," and I think many companies, particularly large global companies, are faced with that challenge. We viewed, and still do view, the corporate intranet as an environment where you can bring people together to share and assure consistency of message. Over time, we've evolved the intranet to be a place where people can get role-based information and tools they need for the jobs they perform. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] So way back in 2000, we were asking ourselves how we could we use the power of the intranet to bring IBM together around a key business challenge. That's really the germination of the idea of the Jam. The Jam is an online, collaborative discussion. It is focused over a very short period of time--we typically run a Jam event for 72 consecutive hours--so that people can come in and out of it as their schedules permit. No matter where they sit geographically, people can participate in the Jam during that period and engage with colleagues around the world regarding a key question. During the Jam, employees interact not just with their colleagues, but with senior management as well. I think it's really this event-like nature, the time-based collaboration, which really drives the momentum and excitement around Jams. Each Jam is a chance to roll up your sleeves and engage with people around the world who you might never otherwise have the chance to engage with. I think that event-like nature really creates a sense of energy; that's where that spark of innovation can come from that can lead to many of the other factors that make a Jam a success. Let me explain. If you're going to run a Jam as an event over a short duration, then you have to be very clear about what you're asking people to engage about: What's the relevancy of the topic to them? …