Collective Intelligence

Executive Report By IBM

Introduction
 In a global environment where innovation cycles are shrinking, customer
expectations are rising and talent is becoming more distributed.

 companies are seeing the need to more effectively apply the knowledge and
experience of individuals, regardless of their affiliation or organization status.

Definition

a shared or group intelligence that emerges from the collaboration

and competition of many individuals.
Example:
1. Wikipedia
The online encyclopedia Wikipedia is one of the best examples of collective
intelligence. Anyone can add information to an existing page or indeed create
a new page of information; pages also hyperlink to other areas of the website
that people have edited.

2. Politics
One example of collective intelligence would be political parties and the way
in which they take the views of people to form policies, select their
candidates and run election campaigns.
3 Areas of Guidance for Organizations:
Through IBM research, we see three areas of guidance for organizations:

First Area of Guidance: Applying Collective Intelligence

1.Applying Collective Intelligence
A. Discovering and sharing new ideas

By using a number of emerging and existing approaches, enterprises can use

networks of employees, customers, business partners, consumers, external
experts and others to:

 Identify new disruptive offering ideas.

 Provide ways to improve business processes and increase efficiency.
 Develop product enhancements based on end-user and customer feedback.
Approaches include
1. Contests and challenges:
 Opportunities or problem statements are presented to members of the crowd.
 Groups of participants work simultaneously to submit their ideas or solutions.
 The Economist Example.

2. Collaborative design markets:

 Using a web interface
 Items can be commented on, rated and ranked
 Identifying those most popular and likely to succeed in the market.
3. Virtual ideation and dialogue:
 Within the ongoing discussion in a virtual environment participants are able to
propose, comment on, refine and, finally, evaluate and rank ideas.
 identify the common themes and prioritize future investments.
 Citi’s Global Transaction Services Example.

4. Communities of practice:
 Communities bring together individuals with a common interest, craft or
profession to develop and share knowledge, best practices and new ideas.
 Incorporating the knowledge of communities into the company’s day-to-day
operations to improve business processes and outcomes.
B. Augmenting skills and distributing workload

1. Parallel Task Processing

 An approach to deconstruct complex problems into smaller ones
 Rapid completion of tasks
 Example: Using the crowd to tag unlabeled digital photo libraries

2. Distributed QUESTION AND ANSWER (Q&A)

 It reduces costs, improves response time and enables social learning
 IBMers get things done more quickly and accurately through Q&A
3. Serious Games
 This approach leverages the vast experience of game mechanics
 Organizations can adjust actual processes and see tangible results.

C. Improving forecasting effectiveness

1. Predicting The Outcomes

 Enabling organizations to make more informed and evidence-based decisions
 Prediction markets to forecast sales and product success
 Examples
Second Area of Guidance:
Second Area of Guidance: Getting players on the field – targeting and
motivating participants
 Identify the individuals or groups whose knowledge and expertise constitute
the “collective” in Collective Intelligence
 Once identified, work to provide the right motivations for them to
participate.

Sourcing the crowd

 Each of the Collective Intelligence methods requires a minimum number of
active participants to generate sufficient valuable insights
 Sourcing of crowd can be done by accumulating culture of the organization
and wellbeing of the employee.
Eventually the appropriate number of individuals to be
targeted will be based on three important factors:
Motivating for participation and engagement
 Sponsors of Collective Intelligence initiatives need to focus on encouraging
individuals to share their insights, expertise or take on specific tasks
 It is important to incorporate both extrinsic and intrinsic motivators

Collective Intelligence in a workforce can be harnessed by following techniques:

 Value Opinion & Feedback  By letting employees know their suggestions,

opinions and feedback matter

 Psychological Safety  Employees feeling psychologically safe can provide rich

source of information, insights and innovation
 Provide a Forum  Provide 24/7 access to a forum that allows them to ask
questions to get best of both worlds.

 Know your employees  Employees are more motivated if their manager knows
them.

 Be smart when allocating work  Employees will be more engaged if efforts are
made to utilize their skills and allocate tasks that suit them.

 Create a sense of purpose  exhibiting company’s mission and set of values will
make employees more responsible.

 Trust  Key factor in motivating participants identified by researchers and thought

leader.
Third Area of Guidance:
Third Area of Guidance: Kick-starting Collective Intelligence initiatives – three
keys to success

 Sources of resistance and risk

 Integrate Collective Intelligence into your work environment
 Act on what you discover

Collective Intelligence
initiatives

Source Integrate Act

Address sources of resistance and risk

 Collective Intelligence or “Crowd Sourcing”.

 Operational Challenges.
 Conflict with existing character and loss of control
o Performance and quality
o Decision making
o Awareness and communications
 Importance of new roles and responsibilities
Integrate Collective Intelligence into your work
environment
Act on what you discover

 The virtual suggestion box concept.

 Continuous learning and Ideas to drive improvements.
 Tracking and recognizing these new performance measures that will help
organizations to optimize their resources.
ADVANTAGES OF CI:
 Creating top-line growth,
 Driving efficiency,
 Improving quality and excellence,
 Building a better employee climate,
 Encouraging everyone to work together towards the organizational goal,
 and dynamically addresses business challenges.
How Collective Intelligence can be used
to enhance business capability?
By pondering over and figure out the following scenarios:

 What are our strategic business objectives, and what types of insight can help
us compete or differentiate ourselves in the market?

o Strategic Business Objectives

o How to compete in the market?
o How to differentiate in the market?
 Considering the employees we may want to involve in a Collective
Intelligence project, how can we motivate them to share their insights with
the organization?

o By giving them the confidence upon their ideas.

o By providing employees extensive education.
o By providing training to the employees.
o By conducting talent management programs.
o By providing them guidance from CI experts.
 How should an organization capture knowledge and connect individuals in new
and cost-effective ways?

 What technology tools does the organization need to support this capability of
CI?

 Who is best positioned to help organization take advantage the technology

tools?
IBM uses Collective Intelligence to
advance Cognitive Intelligence.
 How?
 What is Cognitive build?
 Goals of Cognitive build.
o To deepen employees cognitive computing knowledge.
o To equip them to build real solutions to business problems
o To accelerate the cultural and operational transformation of IBM itself into a
cognitive business
An Experimental Learning Journey by
IBM.
 Guidance From experts.

 Think Academy Learning system.

o Educating their employees regarding the technological change and Cognitive
computing system.

 Use of software and tools.

 Opportunity to develop prototypes.

As a Result
 They were overwhelmed by the responses.

 Wide range of employees were engaged on a single platform.

Any Questions ?