Whilst the crowdfunding market has boomed, with hundreds of platforms now offering the ability to fund and support a huge range of projects, it’s probably fair to say that the model has not made it’s way inside the enterprise.
Sure, you have outliers like the idea market at Rite Solutions that offers funding for the most popular ideas via an internal stock market type arrangement, but they are very much the exception rather than the rule. This is certainly the case as far as big companies are concerned.
So it’s pretty exciting to learn that IBM are giving internal crowdfunding a trial. The company is well known for its use of idea jams to solicit opinion from it’s 100,000+ employees on all sorts of issues, but now they’re trying something a wee bit different.
The project, which was first trialled back in 2012, probably bares more of a likeness to the participative budgeting projects that are in practice around the world, in that the company provide a number of potential uses for funding, and ask employees to make the decision for them.
Five hundred employees are given $100 to support projects from their peers. They could of course propose their own ideas as well, but weren’t allowed to back themselves. The initial trial saw a 46% participation rate.
Thus far the company has run three trials of this approach to project funding, with a fourth soon to get under way.
It’s certainly a nice approach to resourcing projects, and removes many of the personal biases that can often emerge when managers have their particular pet projects that they like to see supported. This approach is much more democratic.
Suffice to say, with $100 per employee invested in this scheme, the size and scale of the projects are going to verge towards the small side of things rather than the large corporate wide projects that the company undertakes. Will they eventually scale things up if these initial trials go well? Time will tell, but any increase in employee involvement is surely a positive step, so for that they must be applauded.
You'd imagine most crowdfunding money goes to support the people working on a project, ie the founders. Since in this case IBM already employ the people behind the project, where is the money going to be spent?
Is it just for physical 'stuff', and the employees are allowed to use their normal working hours to implement their ideas? Or are they getting paid to work on it in their free time outside of work?
I suspect that the money allocated to employees is more symbolic and will act as a way to cast a vote as much as anything else.
I don't like this at all. So an employee puts forward their idea, IBM then implements it and either makes or saves a whole lot of money. What does the employee get out of it?
If they were serious about it, they'd have at least $10,000 per person for each employee to intelligently divide among projects — with some sort of reward for folks supporting winning projects; in the form of a revenue share, E.g. 10% of revenue reserved for winners; allocated among employees that supported in proportion to each employee's contribution.
Hmm, most of the companies I've worked at let managers put any spend below 10k on the credit card as it was barely worth the bother scrutinizing anything below that, so for this to really work it will require at least 100 people to back each idea.
Don't get me wrong, it's a nice concept, but it needs scaling up quite a bit to have any real impact.
Social entrepreneurship can be a process with which citizens construct or alter institutions to be able to
advance ways of social problems, such as poverty, illness, illiteracy, environmental destruction, human being rights violations, and data
corruption, in order to generate life better for many people.
So much for the people deconstructionists whom contend that a social organization must never
make money, or would be wise to make money, or must address some forms
of problems although not others!