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For IBMers, this has a very specific meaning: it’s not about being the world’s most “innovative” company (though our patent records would argue that we are). Rather, it’s about becoming the ideal partner to make our clients, our partners and our communities into world‑class innovators.
IBMers collaborate every day with their 330,000 colleagues…with growing networks of clients, advocates, experts and peers…and with our neighbors, local organizations and millions of people they have never met and never will meet. This is simply how business is done in a globally integrating economy. But it’s also how society itself is evolving in an increasingly “flat” world. And the points of contact, impact and collaboration between a business and its broader ecosystem are both multiplying and deepening daily.
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Obviously, for any given company, this involves far more than “giving back to the community.” We might think of this new approach as “collaborative citizenship”— and the accounts in this report of how IBMers demonstrate it are varied and inspiring. Some have to do with creating new technology, some with new business and societal models. Some are focused on organizational culture and management systems, some on public policy. IBMers are partnering with neighbors on issues that live at the local level, and with broad societal ecosystems on problems and opportunities that are truly global in scope.
In all this work, we use in the not-for-profit world the same collaborative approach that we bring to business. Together with our partners, IBMers are spawning new ways to combat poverty and infectious disease…to transform education, and bring its benefits to the displaced and dispossessed…to secure the world’s trade lanes and electronic commerce…and to enable our joint stewardship of a fragile planet.
All of the stories here reveal two consistent characteristics. First, IBMers do not simply invent technologies or products, they innovate models, policies and solutions. Second, they do so not in isolation, but by working shoulder-to-shoulder to enhance and transform civil society, to develop innovative approaches to corporate responsibility—and to reimagine the process of collaboration itself.
From World Community Grid, to our Global Innovation Outlook, to HabitatJam, to On Demand Community, to our Global Pandemic Initiative, to our work with the open source community and more, our people are building broad industry, business and societal ecosystems that draw upon the “wisdom of crowds” to accelerate progressive change — for our company, and for the world.
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