Rebecca Hosch isn’t your typical inventor. As an administrative aide at a military software company, she spends most of her time poring over pattern-recognition algorithms and other arcana. But her world opened up after her company, Rite-Solutions, created a kind of online stock market for ideas dreamed up by employees. Each worker would “invest” fake money in the ideas they liked, and values would rise and fall accordingly. Fun wasn’t the only point; company founders James Lavoie and Joseph Marino vowed to back the best ideas with real cash. When Hosch suggested that Rite-Solutions exploit its algorithms, used to pick out enemy signals or incoming missiles, to create an educational kids’ game, her stock shot through the roof. After spending $20,000 to develop “Win, Play, Learn”, Rite-Solutions sold the game last Christmas to toy maker Hasbro for $1 million. Says Lavoie, “This brings forward the quiet geniuses in our organisation.”

In recent years Internet firms like YouTube, eBay and MySpace have discovered that the most creative, hardest-working teams are often users themselves. That’s how eBay became one of Wal-Mart’s strongest contenders, Wikipedia moved in on Encyclopedia Britannica’s turf and computer games like Sim City and Second Life began attracting as many eyeballs as Hollywood blockbusters. Now corporate managers are hoping to profit from a bit of the same magic, by exploiting the intellectual potential of their employees.

Online virtual-reality worlds allow companies to host vast brainstorming sessions. Presentations to global work forces can be made using interactive game-show-style webcasts, which let employees ask questions and share opinions in real time. The days when corporate strategies were hatched in boardrooms and sent down a one-way pipeline to workers may be ending. Because these technologies allow everyone from the computer technician in Bangalore to the customer in Boston to the CEO in Beirut to collaborate effectively, they’re changing the way corporations are managed. “We’re moving from a command and control model to one of collaboration and teamwork,” says Cisco CEO John Chambers.

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