Following its recent gigantic on-line brainstorming session called InnovationJam — which included 150,000 people from 104 countries to come up with new ideas for the company’s Research organization to-do list — IBM has announced that it will invest $100 million investment over the next two years to new ideas generated during the meeting of minds. Participants posted more than 46,000 ideas during the session. “Collaborative innovation models require you to trust the creativity and intelligence of your employees, your clients and other members of your innovation network,” said Samuel J. Palmisano, chairman, president and CEO, IBM, in a recent teleconference with employees worldwide. “We opened up our labs, said to the world, ‘Here are our crown jewels, have at them’. The Jam — and programs like it – are greatly accelerating our ability to innovate in meaningful ways for business and society.” Some of the targeted investments will include, according to an IBM announcement:

• Smart healthcare payment systems — payment and management systems controlled via small personal devices that will automatically trigger financial transactions, the processing of insurance claims and the updating of electronic health records;
• Developing simplified business engines, easy-to-use and pre-packaged sets of Web 2.0 services and blade server offerings that allow small and mid-size businesses to easily tap customized business applications tailored to their own needs;
• Real-time translation services across major languages;
• Partnering with other companies to build a standards-based 3D Internet;
• Creating a secure, user-friendly service that stores long-term personal content that people accumulate, such as digital photos, videos, music, health and financial records, personal identification documents, and other things;
• Enabling remote, inaccessible populations in fast-growing markets to have basic banking services;
• Developing an on demand systems real-time monitoring of all transit systems, optimizing buses, rail, highways, waterways and airlines;
• Advancing electronic health records through the creation of a standards-based infrastructure to support automatic updating of, and pervasive access to, personal healthcare records and the integrating of patient data with global payer/provider transaction systems; and
• Launching a new business unit in IBM that will focus on technologies for emerging environmental opportunities, such as advanced water modeling, water filtration via nanotechnology and efficient solar power systems.