The "Institute For The Future" had a conference this week on the Future Of Work sparked a new line of thinking for me.  I'd been assuming that the inherent nature of corporate structures would prevent them from really taking advantage of PebbleStorming...but then I spoke to Joel Vardy of Siemens at lunch.  It turns out he's heading (if I get this right...), the north american efforts of Siemens to generate more internal ideas, collaboration and leverage of their huge investment in research.

Hmm....the wheels turned.

These multi-national, multi-division companies have far more assets, research and networks than they can put to work today.  How much new-new stuff do they really need to build, versus leveraging what they already have?  Instead of building 80% of everything from scratch, perhaps it should be 20% - just the most cutting edge, differentiated projects.  And then put a lot more effort into leveraging all their existing assets in new and crazy ways.

So I can see the PebbleStorm ideas applying in these large, diversified, fragmented companies: they have a trusted (sort of) network, lots of diverse talents and passions, and tremendoes existing assets.  It's the right ingredients for a PebbleStorm.

[Yes, an example would be helpful here sometime]