Most vendors must guess what customers want to buy, and how they'll use it. For IBM, however, with about 400,000 employees, it has the potential to be its own best laboratory, one that becomes even more potent when mixed with active participation in open-source communities.

That potential, as I discovered in an interview on Friday with Jeff Schick, IBM's vice president of social software, isn't a "gimme," but is powerful if you can enable the right sort of corporate culture and processes.

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