Max Goldman of the Performance & Talent Management blog points out that Yahoo! is following in the footsteps of Google by allowing its employees to spend more of their time on innovative new projects: “Called Brickhouse, the project is essentially an in-house incubator meant to give it’s entrepreneurial employees another reason to stick with the company. Not altogether different from the Google 20% – wherein Googlers get to spend 20% of their time on a project of their choosing – it is both a way to satisfy the innate desire to create as well as a method for harnessing that creativity.”

As GigaOm suggests, Project Brickhouse is designed to give superstar employees a chance to fool around with new ideas on the side, while at the same time preventing them from jumping ship to start-up Web 2.0 companies. At Yahoo!, there’s a realization that the Web 2.0 boom has changed the playing field for technology companies looking to recruit the best and the brightest:

“Big companies are no longer the safe havens they were during the tech bust. Self-styled “startup people” - especially those like Caterina Fake, who were brought in through acquisitions - long for the bureaucracy-free feeling of going up against the Man, not being the Man. With funding so easily available, Yahoo’s stock treading water, and most of their options vested, it’s tempting to jump ship… SideStep CEO Rob Solomon, who was employeee 2,100 or so at Yahoo, told me earlier this year there were perhaps 300 or 400 left of the employees who were at Yahoo when he started.”

Maybe it’s just me, but I think Yahoo! could have chosen a better name than Brickhouse. I suppose there are two ways of thinking about “brickhouse” - as a cute, one-story house that the big bad wolf can’t blow down or as a battle-scarred building in a charred out urban area. If I’m walking the streets of New York, and I see a building with a bricked up window, yo, I stay away. Every company needs to hold on to its top talent, but building a brick wall around that talent - is that the best solution?

[images: Urban Brickhouse and Wolf Blowing at Brick House]

Industry Week points out that it is still possible to submit an application to become an innovation advisor to U.S. Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez: “Dubbed the Measuring Innovation in the 21st Century Economy Advisory Committee, the panel of not more than 15 members is slated to counsel Gutierrez on new or improved measures of innovation that will help explain how innovation occurs, its extent across the economy and how innovation affects economic growth and productivity.”

The final day to submit an application is September 29.

Tags: innovation government commerce Carlos Gutierrez

[image: Carlos Gutierrez]