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IBM and the New Corporate Citizenship

By Jeff Hittner

IBM, July 22, 2008

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Devin Stewart interviews IBM's Jeff Hittner on how the company is adapting its social responsibility goals to fit an interactive era where customers are making new demands on corporate citizenship. One internal initiative was IBM's Values Jam, a collaborative process by which thousands of employees worked to define innovations that would matter to their business and the world. Hittner describes the energy of the Values Jam as "a wiki and Facebook on steroids times a thousand."

The company also hosts an annual Global Innovation Outlook conference, where recently a focus on Africa led to consulting with microfinance organizations to improve computing and lower costs. The IBM Foundation division employs "strategic philanthropy" that builds on the company's strengths, such as linking latent machines around the world to form a "virtual supercomputer" that can help run useful scientific calculations during downtime.

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