Collaborative solutions

Section Five Partnering to Change the Way the World Works

Our Challenges

Providing solutions to help clients address social and environmental opportunities and issues

Developing IBM’s position as a natural solutions partner in a data-rich world comprised of complex systems

Our Opportunities

Improving energy consumption and reducing emissions used by IT products and services

Addressing the world’s most pressing challenges through collaboration, while maintaining intellectual property rights

Our Strategy

Investing in greener technologies that enable our clients to reduce their environmental impact

Using the power of collaboration to develop innovative solutions to global problems

Pursuing a balanced approach to intellectual property and maintaining it as a strategic business asset, while supporting open standards

In this section download

This section features limited excerpts from the printed version of the report. For the complete report with Key Performance Indicators – or the full contents of this section – see the downloads to the right.

Introduction
The IBM 2008 CEO Study told us that organizations are aware of the need for profound change to compete in an increasingly networked and dynamic global economy. And they plan bold moves in response. However, most also felt that their organizations were not ready to carry out the level of change required.

CEOs realize that tackling these issues requires a commitment to progressive, innovation-based agendas — the ability to build organizational cultures and sustainable processes that welcome and engage in diverse and open partnerships. It will also necessitate continual adaptation, the learning of new skills. And both of these imperatives will require collaborative approaches that are larger in scale, more diverse — and inherently less predictable — than those of the past.

The Collaborative Solutions section covers how IBM approaches sustainability from several different vantage points, including:

Solutions for Corporate Social Responsibility: Energy and the Environment
Power of Collaboration: Innovation in the 21st Century
Balanced Innovation: Open Standards & Open Source Computing

Open Source Software: Disaster Relief

Open source disaster management software allows for complete customization in real time. Additional data filters are instantly accessible, facilitating aid. Call-out link to in-depth descriptions pages, with up-to-the-minute statistics. Customizable maps of disaster areas can be overlaid with various data: type of disaster, casualties, shelters, etc.

Dr. Laura DeNardis, executive director, Yale Information Society Project

“The globalization of information production has created new opportunities to decentralize innovation. New business models are responding to market demand for more open information flows — and are capitalizing on the availability of distributed intelligence and new norms of collaborative and decentralized production.

The ongoing shift to open, rather than proprietary, standards is necessary to continue advancing the pace of information technology innovation. Companies like IBM have increasingly pursued more open business models that promote innovation, interoperability and global economic development.

Open standards — those that are developed in a participatory and transparent process and made publicly available with minimal intellectual property barriers — enable the technical interoperability demanded by today’s information society. They also promote innovation by enabling competition among products based on the standard and provide the transparency and public accountability that standards-setting organizations need to architect public policy in the global knowledge economy.”

In this section download, you can also read a perspective from Professor Zheng Qinghua, Xi’an Jiaotong University.