"[Chief executive] Ginni Rometty said in her remarks at IBM's first THINK conference this year that every 25 years there is a major shift, but I think we've reinvented ourselves every 10 years," she says.

"If you look at whether it was the e-business, or smart economies, or quantum or cognitive computing, each of these occurred on eight- to 10-year horizons where we saw a new trend, we incubated it and then we adjusted and pivoted like any other company."

World's most powerful

Earlier this month IBM and the US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory unveiled the world's most powerful super-computer, with a peak performance of 200,000 trillion calculations per second. This followed IBM showing off the world's smallest computer at THINK in March.

Adjusting and pivoting are terms more closely associated with a start-up than one of the top 100 largest companies in the world, but Ms Wieck says like in a start-up, many of "Big Blue's" new ideas are generated from its employees, rather than being driven from the top.

IBM's general manager of blockchain, Marie Wieck, says "Big Blue" started investing in blockchain after two teams began investigating its uses independently. Mary Johnson

"We started working on blockchain four years ago and there had been spots of work all over," she says.

"Everyone thought it was key to transactions, but we quickly came back and realised this isn't just transactions, it's a data platform. We started working on it and about the same time so did the research team, but we came from two different vantage points, so we were tackling both the technology side and figuring out what solutions could use blockchain."


After these pockets of work surfaced, blockchain appeared in IBM's internal yearly global technology outlook (GTO) (which is not released to the public) for the second time, and a new business unit was created.

The GTO takes a full year to develop within IBM's research division and involves the participation of all teams. The process kicks off in January when designated members of each team collect ideas, which are narrowed down and presented to IBM's senior executives in November.

Rometty has not always been trusted by shareholders, who only just passed her last payrise.

A review committee then decides which areas to funnel investment into for the following year.

Global effort

Now, IBM is one of the leading forces behind the Hyperledger consortium, a group of big businesses and organisations committed to building open-source business blockchain technologies.

At its THINK conference this year it also announced four new blockchain initiatives, including the beta launch of the IBM Blockchain Platform Starter Plan, aimed at giving start-ups and developers a way to build their own blockchain networks quickly and cheaply.

Ms Wieck says the GTO is a crucial part of IBM's process for driving innovation, but ultimately innovation is dependent on achieving the right cultural and procedural settings.


Inside IBM's quantum research lab in Yorktown. Supplied

"We have a culture that encourages and rewards innovation, invention, curiosity, wild ducks and trying something new. It's one of our values and everyone pretty much has it tattooed on their heads – innovation that matters for us and the world and the communities we serve," she says.

"From a process perspective, every year we do a three-year strategy plan of where we see growth opportunities, what's changing, what are the threats, what are the risks … and what opportunities we can afford to invest in."

Scepticism over Ginni's vision

But not everyone is sold on IBM's relevance in this new age of computing. Some commentators have called on Rometty to step down after numerous quarters of revenue decline and investors have been critical of her large pay packet of $US33 million ($44.3 million).

In May last year when shareholders were asked to vote on a proposal to increase Rometty's total remuneration by more then 60 per cent, the motion only narrowly passed, with 46 per cent of shareholders voting against it.

Since Rometty took on the top job at IBM in January 2013, replacing retiring chief Sam Palmisano, Big Blue's revenue had declined for 22 straight quarters. However, this nightmare trend ended last December, with the company announcing its fourth-quarter revenue was up 3.6 per cent to $US22.5 billion.

Despite this, revenue for the full year was still down for its sixth year, dipping to $US79.1 billion.


AI shift

At IBM's THINK conference in March in Las Vegas, Rometty declared that society was at the start of a seismic technological shift, the like of which occurs once every 25 years. She said this revolution would be driven by artificial intelligence.

In an attempt to coin a phrase referencing its own AI product, she said that this new period of exponential learning driven by data analytics could be named "Watson's Law".

Like blockchain, IBM is also backing advances in healthcare and genomics as a major play for its future.

IBM healthcare and life sciences research industry leader Christine Kretz says the company has advanced from an initial recognition that it had capability in the field of genomics, to commercialising Watson for Genomics within two and a half years.

The software service helps oncologists provide personalised medicine for cancer patients, based on the results of genetic testing of tumour tissue. Watson analyses and categorises the tumour for genetic alterations, which affect cancer progression and the effectiveness of treatments.

"With the GTO … some people get told to go and do the thing after the review meeting and get swept up in the fun. Other ideas maybe a little slower," Kretz says.

"Genomics is a great example because we had this core team of guys, who had been at IBM for years, who could manipulate genomic data. Then this new tool came along with Watson and it could read a tonne of stuff, but it couldn't read genomics because it's a code, so this bubbled up as a great idea."


Employee independence

At a grassroots level, IBM employees are increasingly empowered to test and trial ideas of their own accord.

In 2016 when IBM launched its IBM Q Experience, which gives the community the ability to run algorithms and experiments on IBM's 16-qubit quantum computer, the quantum research team launched it without the knowledge or approval of their superiors.

"Within days it had more than 10,000 users. It was an embrace of new technology in a way that has never happened before," IBM quantum chief technology officer Bob Wisnieff says.

"The day after we launched the head of research called a meeting. We hadn't actually told him we were going to try it because we thought it could flop. He said: 'Next time you change the world, tell me first because I really want to know.'"

Wisnieff, who has been at IBM for more than 22 years, says not every company would allows its staff to experiment and invest in moonshot projects, with no guarantee of returns.

"I woke up the next day after we launched it and I had an email from our CEO, who was on a plane to Asia," he recalls.

"She wanted a one-page description of what we were doing in quantum computing before she landed because she knew that the customers would be asking her about it and we hadn't bothered to brief her, simply because we hadn't told anybody."

The reporter travelled to THINK and IBM's Yorktown research lab as a guest of IBM.