There’s an interesting article in USA Today this week about how IBM approach to its Watson division led to it playing a critical role in making big data less unwieldy, supporting digital health startups and becoming a resource for the healthcare industry. Not bad for a computer brain that got its start as a Jeopardy contestant.
Mike Rhodin, who heads up IBM Watson, did the interview from the University of Michigan where he was scheduled to speak to a couple of entrepreneur groups. He noted that the freedom the Watson team had within IBM was key.
“What’s important about the way we incubated Watson initially was that we isolated it. We gave them the freedom to operate as a startup; there really wasn’t much marketing at first,” Rhodin said.
Because it recognized that its technology had wide variety of applications in different industry sectors, it made its cloud-based platform available to start-ups to build their own applications. It’s been just over one year since the launch of IBM Watson. Since its commercial launch, Watson Group has collaborated with partners to build 6,000 apps, the article notes.
Rhodin talks about the company’s role as a startup benefactor.
“It’s a very similar model to Silicon Valley startups. You can use Watson for free to build your apps, and then when you commercialize, we get a percentage. We also created a dedicated standalone $100 million investment fund for start-ups in this cognitive space, to help further the cause and move technology forward.”
The fact that Watson Group’s work in machine learning and natural language processing has become a mainstream media story is pretty interesting on its own. But it also illustrates what a lot of corporations would like to do themselves and can’t — either because they don’t have the necessary culture or the will or finances to pull it off. Several providers and payers have developed innovation centers and support entrepreneurs, but it’s tough to say whether these are merely good marketing stories or whether their investments in digital health will have a transformative effect for healthcare delivery.
