Great idea - bring the bazaar of ideas (ala Linux) to the marketplace.

LIKE many top executives, James R. Lavoie and Joseph M. Marino keep a close eye on the stock market. But the two men, co-founders of Rite-Solutions, a software company that builds advanced — and highly classified — command-and-control systems for the Navy, don't worry much about Nasdaq or the New York Stock Exchange.

Instead, they focus on an internal market where any employee can propose that the company acquire a new technology, enter a new business or make an efficiency improvement. These proposals become stocks, complete with ticker symbols, discussion lists and e-mail alerts. Employees buy or sell the stocks, and prices change to reflect the sentiments of the company's engineers, computer scientists and project managers — as well as its marketers, accountants and even the receptionist.

Great idea - bring the bazaar of ideas (ala Linux) to the marketplace.

LIKE many top executives, James R. Lavoie and Joseph M. Marino keep a close eye on the stock market. But the two men, co-founders of Rite-Solutions, a software company that builds advanced — and highly classified — command-and-control systems for the Navy, don't worry much about Nasdaq or the New York Stock Exchange.

Instead, they focus on an internal market where any employee can propose that the company acquire a new technology, enter a new business or make an efficiency improvement. These proposals become stocks, complete with ticker symbols, discussion lists and e-mail alerts. Employees buy or sell the stocks, and prices change to reflect the sentiments of the company's engineers, computer scientists and project managers — as well as its marketers, accountants and even the receptionist.

Cool idea.

I immediately liked the concept of InnoCentive as well when I saw it first. There's some mild concern that the logical limits of such a system has everyone being a freelance worker, competing with everyone else. In the current world, of course, once you've got your job, you're not really competing fairly with everyone else... you've got an advantage due to locality and overhead and so forth.

I wonder if there's enough work available for everyone to be freelanced... does our system depend on inefficiency to maintain the employment rate?