I get this question a fair amount of times, and it came up at New Paradigm’s Enterprise 2.0 all-member meeting in a couple of weeks ago. That is: “How can established companies (sometimes people use the word “legacy”…) compete with newer ones in an Enterprise 2.0 world?” A corollary to that question might also be, “How can established companies embrace the Net Generation.” If you were watching the Today Show this morning, you heard the author of the book “Mavericks at Work,” which was first published in 2006 and came out in paperback last month, mention IBM’s effort to answer those questions, and it started with one person who took a bold risk.

Some of you may already be familiar with IBM’s “Extreme Blue” internship program, which was started by a woman named Jane Harper at IBM who went out on her own — a maverick — and created the skunkworks within IBM that eventually grew to become a formal, companywide initiative. As “Mavericks at Work” author Polly LaBarre asked on the Today Show, why would any young, talented person work for IBM today when they can work for a Google or similar company? Worried about that very phenomenon, IBM expanded a few years ago on the nascent ideas of its maverick employee to create a program for eager, talented NGeners that’s now worldwide. In 12-week internships, NGeners work on real-world projects in one of 14 labs and have been responsible for more than 60 open-source products and more than 360 patent disclosures.

So to answer the question about how established companies compete with newer ones in an Enterprise 2.0 world, one of the answers is to take risks and start small. IBM proved it’s a formula that can work.