Posted by
Karl Roche in
How often have you been told to ’stop doing that’ because x,y and z is bad for you? Plenty, if you’re anything like me.
We get these sorts of messages everyday with the earliest examples usually from our parents and schools. It’s a common theme throughout life that usually continues after school into work. Quite honestly, people stop listening, especially when the reason for not doing something isn’t adequately conveyed.
If we take the environment, which probably contains the largest number of groups telling people to stop doing this, that or the other, people begin to push back. People don’t like being told what not to do. Even reasonable people think that being told not to drive but use public transport when it will take them longer and will cost them more is just crazy – they want the alternative to be better.
So lets flip it. Lets ’start’ something. Today in London, IBM announced that it will be the exclusive partner for a nine day summit in September 2010 called surprisingly, START. It aims to explore what business can do for sustainability and what sustainability can do for business. In many ways it is just a start. Even though it is an event, START is also a national (UK) initiative of the The Prince’s Charities Foundation will continue way past September and a street in London coming to communities across the UK.
Over nine days, IBM summit at START will bring together a brains trust of thought leaders to come up with ideas that organisations can sign up to because it makes sense for them and their business – not just the environment. All the ideas, findings and debates will be published online. Each day will focus on a different topic, such as new skills, the future of cities, energy and transport. You can see that in all cases that no single organisation or government is responsible for everything within these topics, it requires a number of bodies to come together and work together. So the summit will try to build a community of collaboration, discuss ways we can all work together to make stuff really happen, to make the alternative better than what we have now.
At the launch in London today, Steven Leonard, Chief Exec for IBM UK said, “the challenge [is] bringing all the necessary constituents together to develop and deliver more complex solutions to make the world – literally work smarter.”
Collaboration between organisations, public and private, is essential to make this initiative work. I for one am excited about the opportunities that this could bring up, such as the need to develop new skills myself and the push it will give to widen the use of social tools within business. Is it going to be easy? No. Will it all happen in 9 days? I very much doubt it, but there needs to be a point where we say, things have to change and we mark the beginning with this event.
But before the event we have a few weeks, time in which partners and invited companies will be starting to collaborate using our collaboration tools. So that the final agenda for each day will be built on the basis of the combined expertise. Essential to begin as you intend to go on.
Caroline Taylor, VP leading Project Start in IBM raised an essential point at today’s launch about the next generation: “If sustainability is about securing the future, young people are that future, and they will be vital in ensuring we define genuinely 21st century and forward thinking solutions.” Day 4 and 5 are devoted to new skills and starting young.
It’s not all work, work, work…there will also be a 12 day public festival that apart from being great fun will also give clear, simple and positive ideas on how people can start doing things that will help them lead a sustainable future. There will be plenty of big names in attendance, including two of my favourite comedians, secret gigs, mystery artists and a host of other good stuff.
Where’s this all happening? IBM summit at START will be hosted in Lancaster House, The Mall, London, September 8th – 16th. with the START garden party happening right next door in Green Park. Hopefully we will also be able to broadcast large parts of the business event over Livestream, no doubt we will have more updates here.
Prince of Wales (centre) at the launch of the "IBM Summit at Start" which will be held over 9 day in September 2010
The Start founding partners include: IBM, B&Q, Virgin Money, M&S, Asda, EDF Energy, Addison Lee, BT Group plc and Waitrose. Full list of supporting organisations on the web site.
Read more about IBM Summit at Start.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=5026fee1-7e6d-4160-b1f1-b5dd9b304bff)
Posted by
Guest in
by Cary Barbour, IBM
IBMers are a proud lot for many reasons. One of the things that makes me proud to be part of this organization is the impact that we have in our communities, and our company’s overall social responsibility. In fact, citizens in general – and IBM employees in particular – are becoming more and more interested in their communities and societal engagement. A company that’s dedicated to making a difference and being a responsible corporate citizen is a company that more people are interested in working for and staying at.
But IBMers are not the only ones who value these traits – others are impressed by them too, and that’s helping to boost our brand equity. As many of you have seen, IBM was recently selected as #2 in BrandZ’s ranking of the Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands for 2010. Sure, some of the criteria used to rank companies are not surprising: building trust, making a brand personal, using heritage to create authenticity. Those make sense and they’re hugely important. But the things that resonate most with me might not be quite as intuitive when it comes to brand equity – citizenship and corporate social responsibility.
In a tight economy like the one we’ve been in for the past couple of years, corporate giving and philanthropy tend to be some of the first casualties. As companies around the globe have struggled through one of the toughest recessions on record, a lot of them have dialed down or entirely stopped community donations and volunteering programs. But not IBM.
Corporate social responsibility and community engagement are part of IBM’s nearly 100-year history. Our focus has always been on innovation that matters for our communities, helping IBMers feel fulfilled and developing the next bench of leaders. It’s our business culture and our community culture.
See IBM’s VP of Corporate Citizenship and Corporate Affairs, Stan Litow, speak about this value to communities, employees and brand equity here.
The Corporate Service Corps is a perfect example of how IBM employees are engaging in communities, feeling more fulfilled in their jobs and enhancing their leadership development. This program is taking what’s at the heart of our Smarter Planet strategy and enabling groups of highly talented employees from a range of countries to volunteer their time and travel to emerging markets to help improve economic development, government services, and stimulate job growth.
There are three main advantages to programs like this. They benefit the cities in these emerging markets by helping them to leverage intelligence and improve critical systems such as transportation, water, food safety, education and healthcare. They benefit the groups of IBM volunteers by building their teaming abilities, providing a cultural learning experience, and offering a chance to broaden their skills and test them out in emerging markets.
And for IBM, which has created this program to enable this expert volunteerism, it provides an enormous benefit by building bridges between high-talent employees and important urban centers around the world and developing the type of leadership to help the company lead globally in the 21st Century.
With programs like this, we’re not just tossing our spare change back to the community, with the only goal being generosity. But rather we are taking what is most valuable to the IBM company – our innovation technology and the skill and talent of our people – and contributing it into the communities we live and work in. IBM’s overall approach to philanthropy goes beyond simple check writing and harnesses our company’s industry leading technology, the talents and passions of IBM employees, and our Smarter Planet vision. That’s one of the reasons we keep talented employees around, and it’s one of the reasons I’m proud to be an IBMer. It’s also helping to build our brand equity around the world, as more and more people see the value we’re creating in our communities.
These days, companies are collecting huge volumes of data about customers, products, employees, and services. One of the big challenges is storing and trackiing it in superior ways so they can do business effectively and comply with regulations. Our IBM Research scientists in Japan, New York, Zurich and elsewhere are working hard to produce major advances in this area, which we call managing business integrity.
An important piece of the puzzle is just now coming out of our Tokyo lab. Working on behalf of Japanese insurance giant Dai-ichi Life, IBM researchers have produced a new semantic analysis tool that the insurance company expects will save it millions of dollars per year by improving its ability to diagnose and fix problems that emerge in its business processes, such as processing claims. It’s a so-called First-of-a-Kind project where researchers accelerate the development of technology by working closely with a client on its real-world problems.
The insurance company converted from paper-based claims processing to a digital system, but couldn’t gather sufficiently detailed information about the actions taken at each stage of the process. When each employee involved in the process completes their discrete task and passes the claim on to the next person in the workflow, the actions they take are recorded as event logs. But the workflow system does not record complete information in the logs, making it harder to resolve quality and efficiency issues. “Invisibility was the problem,” says Satoshi Hada, one of the lead researchers on the project.
Posted by
Guest in
by Martin Kelly, IBM Venture Capital Group
When we talk about a Smarter Planet our discussions usually move very quickly from the general to the specific. Take water management as an example. What is a Smart Bay? How does the technology capture weather data in real-time? How will it improve the quality of my drinking water? Can I use the information to plan my fishing trip this weekend? The most interesting conversations are about the detail of how the solution operates.
Most Smarter Planet solutions however involve many different groups. Typically these companies and organizations range in size from large multinationals to smaller niche players and start-ups. Each one however brings a different part of the solution and unique domain knowledge and experience. In this post however I want to talk about these ecosystems and what we are doing to support them.
It’s about communities and entrepreneurs
Over the last couple of years we have been watching as organizations like Seedcamp, TechStars and Y-Combinator have started to build a network of highly active ecosystems. They have successfully helped entrepreneurs build businesses with lots of mentoring and very small amounts of cash. They have successfully engaged the broad community of seasoned veterans to support young entrepreneurs and share experience and networks. They have started to build new role models for entrepreneurs to show how building your own business is an exciting and rewarding career path. Their way of working and geographies are slightly different however they all have great mentor networks and a model which puts the entrepreneur at the centre.
It is interesting for me is to watch how the energy of the entrepreneur is matched with the experience of the mentors who have ‘done it’ before. To see how they learn and evolve very quickly to adsorb new insights and outlooks. Also to see that the gap is not capital (most of the time) but skills, experience and networks. This energy and experience is important if we want to build a Smarter Planet.
Smartcamp grew from our involvement in these programs.
What is SmartCamp
SmartCamp is designed for start-ups who are developing solutions which fit this vision of a Smarter Planet and connecting them with a global network of mentors, entrepreneurs and investors.
The program will be rolled out to 7 cities in 2010. In each location, five companies will be selected to spend one day networking with 25 world-class entrepreneurs, investors and industry experts. Selected companies will be invited to the global finals week to be held in Nov.
SmartCamp aims to accelerate the expansion and internationalization of promising companies. We do this a number of ways. Firstly, selected companies receive 12 week mentoring. During this time we identify appropriate resources IBM has in terms of technology, marketing and go-to-market globally. Secondly, in addition to our own resources we look to leverage our network. For example via our Venture Capital team we work with leading investors to filter and showcase appropriate companies. Last year 4 of the 5 selected SmartCamp companies received funding or investment offers from our partners.
As you might expect these events will be covered by leading local and international press.
What types of start-ups?
SmartCamp is interested in early stage technology companies who are helping to build a Smarter Planet including:
•Networking and Mobility
•Enterprise Software Applications
•Internet & SAAS
•Cloud and IT infrastructure
•Healthcare & IT related
•Analytics and Modelling
•Energy efficiency and Smart buildings
•Carbon and Water management
•Transportation systems
•Smart Cities including – transportation, education, and public safety
•Risk management
Presenting companies will at the seed or start-up stage. In all cases the process is open to companies with revenues
less than $1m in the last 12 months.
Next Steps – Apply today
Smartcamp is now open – the first event is Stockholm on the 20th May. The other locations and dates are:
Additional locations include:
Stockholm 20th May
Boston 3rd June
Tel Aviv 24th June
London: 21st July
Silicon Valley: 8th Sept
Paris: 16th Sept
Dublin: 15th Nov
Note: deadline is typically 14 days before the event
And finally….
In future posts we’ll ask our partners like Seedcamp and Techstars to talk about their experiences of building these networks. We’ll also ask the selected companies from 2009 to post on what they are doing and what SmartCamp means for them.
Posted by
Karl Roche in
Is your city looking a bit rough around the edges? Do you wonder what it will be like in 20 years time? Does it even feel like your city?
After moving to London 17 years ago it took me a while to feel like this was home and that I had a right to complain or think that things could be done better – possibly because I lived in a new borough every year. I suppose only now that one of my kids attends a school and we have been in the London Borough of Sutton for 7 years that I truly feel like I have a stake in this city. I’m really starting to think about the decisions that are being made around planning and developing of local provisions such as getting my kids into a good school, the availability healthcare (the hospital both my kids were born at has been under threat of closer) and if we have an ample local supply of power and water and are we protected against floods? Not to mention how will we all get around the cities we live in.
As more and more of us live in urban settings, these cities are going to have to get better, get smarter and serve inhabitants better just to remain as viable places to live and work. Some cities will do this better than others which will mean a shift of populations to those that get it right, away from those that don’t. Employers and especially talented individuals will move to places that serve them better. It’s not just about growth, but about cities working better. The competition between cities is more alive now than ever, and it will change faster than ever before.
I can see the problems in my own city of London, but also the opportunities. We have a huge number of talented and creative people in the UK. I hope for my kids we can improve things and set the bar high.
City of Dreams
These 6 short films highlight some of the challenges UK cities face in some of those areas that will decide whether we stay or go, including transport, energy, education and healthcare. With interviews from senior leaders in the public and private sector, alongside IBM technology and business specialists, each gives their insights into the opportunities that exist to transform the way our cities function.
More of these videos plus a 3D version of City of Dreams at ibm.com/uk/cities
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=3cc823aa-b161-4ea9-9e44-d2b9d54ad943)
Over the course of 2009, IBM opened centers in Berlin, Beijing, London, New York, Tokyo and Washington D.C. to advance the frontier of analytics: namely turning big data into new intelligence, predictive capabilities and insight.
To sup
port those physical solution centers we launched the Analytics Virtual Center (AVC) at the start of 2010, and welcome you to visit it, especially as we come up on the one year anniversary of the launch of our business analytics initiative.
The AVC underscores a central tenet of Smarter Planet — how digital and physical worlds — databases and drydocks, petabytes and powerplants — are weaving themselves together. Through it, people can extend their physical presence, voice and ideas to a new digital dimension that isn’t constrained by geography.
Simply Easy
The AVC is a web-based and voice-enabled collaboration complex that we built on the web.alive platform, which is now part of IBM partner Avaya’s portfolio. It features a simple set of intuitive controls, quick avatar customization and 3D spatial audio. Many of the hundreds of visitors have found the environment easier to use than other virtual worlds. In fact, most people find themselves “in world” and talking naturally with others within minutes.
While the environment’s navigation and architecture are purposefully minimalist, the facility supports some sophisticated tools, including a full-function “web surface” that can display any web content, including video, animation and Web-based services such as writeboards. Additional wall surfaces can display presentations, documents, photos and graphics.
In addition to an auditorium and six meeting rooms that can be made private for confidential discussions, the AVC includes a rooftop “garden” with six kiosks for different displays, projects or topics. We’re also using the rooftop for an “innovator in residence” program that is open to analytics-related projects or initiatives from academia, startups, NGOs and other organizations seeking to innovate around analytics.
Of course, the AVC is also available for business development and client meetings. And we expect to also put it work as a vehicle for recruiting new talent to IBM, especially for people with expertise in various areas of analytics, simulation, predictive modeling and other aspects of “big data” innovation in areas including energy, smarter cities, healthcare and transportation.
To discuss or schedule a tour, meeting, event, the innovators-in-residence program or how you might like to work with us via the Analytics Virtual Center, we’ve set up a tool with the new Tungle.me appointment service.
You can also leave us a voicemail via Skype.
Posted by
George Faulkner in
As you may have noticed from the last post, IBM’s Sam Palmisano visited the Chatham House stage in London today having delivered a speech titled ‘Welcome to the Decade of Smart.’ Throughout tonight (and over the coming days) we will be posting content and links to images and video from the event here, as they become available.
From the post-event materials being distributed:
On January 12, 2010, Samuel J. Palmisano, IBM Chairman of the Board, President and Chief Executive Officers, addressed business and civic leaders at Chatham House in London. In his remarks, he described how forward-thinking leaders in business, government and civil society around the world are capturing the potential of smarter systems to achieve economic growth, near-term efficiency, sustainable development and societal progress.
Links:
Launch a video of the speech: Sam Palmisano at Chatham House
Launch a video of the Q&A from Chatham House: Q&A from Chatham House
Today, Steve Lohr of the New York Times published a brief article about the speech that takes a look at the past year of Smarter Planet work from IBM.
Paul Glader of the Wall Street Journal published an article today as well that examines aspects of IBM’s Smarter Planet initiative.
As our planet becomes smarter – more interconnected, instrumented, and intelligent – organizations around the world are transforming their workplaces not only by managing their processes more efficiently, but also by unleashing the genius and creativity of the workforce itself.
Everywhere we look, Internet and digital technologies, along with rapid marketplace shifts, are transforming how we work today — how we share information, build relationships and make decisions.
In this video, smart work is explained through simple storytelling and illustrations.
Today, IBM will kick off a 72-hour global “Jam”— a large scale Web 2.0 venue — to explore how work will evolve in the future. Register here and participate in the conversation.
Watch Video
