This past summer IBM hosted a pair of corporation-wide, egalitarian brainstorming sessions called “innovation jams,” that were big enough to go down in the record books. The massive company was able to invite all its 300,000-plus employees, their families, and top clients by holding the jam sessions virtually—inside a specially designed section of the immensely popular online virtual-reality game Second Life. During the jams, each employee appeared as an animated avatar, and was invited to dream up futuristic inventions around any of four main themes: transportation, staying healthy, better planet and commerce. In total, more than 37,000 ideas were floated during the two 72-hour sessions.

Another widely discussed concept was the “digital scrapbook”, a pocketbook-sized device that could hold voice, video, still pictures and handwritten notes. “This is not just a cool brainstorm,” says Dick Anderson, head of IBM corporate media. “We’re coming up with real solutions and real products.” Last month, IBM employees voted on which ideas had the most potential, and senior management is now choosing the best from this short list. CEO Sam Palmisano has vowed to invest $100 million in developing the most promising ideas for production.

By providing a mechanism to sift through thousands of ideas, web technologies are greatly expanding the talent pool that companies can draw from. Executives can monitor how many people are paying attention to video webcasts, for instance, and identify those ideas that touch a nerve. “It’s like having your own Nielsen ratings,” says Greg Pulier, CEO of Interactive Video Technologies (IVT), a new-media company based in California. Whirlpool has adopted a technology developed by IVT that enables employees to create interactive webcasts as easily as they design PowerPoint presentations. When Whirlpool engineers realize a product has a flaw, they create a visual, interactive tutorial on how to fix it, which is immediately available to Whirlpool’s 80,000 employees in 170 countries.

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