Abstract

This research is a collaborative effort between Michael Muller, Werner Geyer, Todd Soule, all of IBM Research, Cambridge MA USA , and John Wafer of IBM, Dublin, Ireland.

Crowdfunding is a relatively recent Internet phenomenon, in which an innovator can propose a project and solicit investments from the public. More than 450 crowdfunding sites are now in operation around the world, such as Kickstarter, Indiegogo, Rockethub, Kiva, and Donors Choose. Successfully-funded projects span much of human aspiration and intention, including charity, creativity, community service, new business initiatives, and financial rate-of-return.

We describe an experiment in crowdfunding inside IBM. Our project, I Fund IT (previously “1×5”), has been run four times — twice in research organizations, and twice in an IT organization. Major outcomes include: employee proposals that addressed diverse individual and collective needs; high participation rates; extensive inter-departmental and international collaboration, including the discovery of large numbers of previously unknown collaborators; and the development of goals and motivations based on collective concerns at multiple levels of project groups, communities of practice, and the organization as a whole. Moving crowdfunding “behind the firewall” is transformative, highlighting opportunities for new forms of collaboration among employees and between employees and upper management. We conclude with our current understanding of success factors, best practices, and implications for theory and design.

Bio

Michael Muller works in the Collaborative User Experience group of IBM Research, and the IBM Center for Social Software. His work focuses on metrics and analytics for enterprise social software applications, and emergent social phenomena in social software. Earlier IBM work involved activity-centric computing and communities of practice.

Michael is an internationally recognized expert in participatory design and participatory analysis. His work in this area includes the development of methods (CARD, PICTIVE, participatory heuristic evaluation) and theory (ethnocritical heuristics), as well as the creation of taxonomies and encyclopedic descriptions of participatory methodology in handbook chapters. Michael contributed expertise on participatory and qualitative analysis to a recent book from the National Academy of Science, as part of a three-year membership in a human-systems integration committee.

Michael is active in IBM’s inventor community. He is head of the Invention Development Team for the Collaborative User Experience group, and was recently recognized as an IBM Master Inventor.

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