Ideas.com

It was every consultant's nightmare. Abdou Touray was on assignment late one Friday afternoon. He was on his own, and he was stumped. A major mutual-fund organization had placed an urgent call to Touray's company, Context Integration, because its computer system kept crashing. Its executives were desperate: Investors were counting on them to manage billions of dollars in assets, and if the system kept crashing, its fund managers couldn't manage anything.

Context had been courting this company for nearly a year, so this was its big chance to impress a potential client. But this was no easy task. About 30 in-house techies hadn't come up with a solution.

Now it was Touray's turn. Touray, 28, may have been working on his own that day, but he wasn't really alone. Supporting him was a Web-based knowledge-management system. Around 5 am on Friday, Touray fired off a "911" message from his laptop, and the system automatically contacted Context employees who are experts on application servers. Over the next hour, colleagues working in New York City, San Francisco, and Houston responded to Touray via email, creating a discussion thread to wrestle with the situation. Finally, something clicked. Touray realized that a URL being relayed from a browser to the system's server was too short. That simple error was causing the system to shut down. Problem solved.

"I let the others know right away," Touray says. "And I'm sure that the news made their weekend." The news certainly made an impression on the client. First, the mutual-fund company's executives exchanged high-fives. And soon afterward, they hired Context for a major new project.

So it goes in the new world of business. Winning companies don't just outhustle or outmuscle the competition. They out-think the competition. Business today is about brains, not brawn. It's about how many ideas you generate, not how many factories you own. And ideas come in many shapes and sizes. Every so often, a company will invent a breakthrough business model that reinvents the rules of competition in an industry. But there's a day-to-day side to competing on ideas: Can your marketing people in Seattle quickly make use of a presentation that wowed a client in Savannah? Can a programmer with a problem in Los Angeles quickly tap the expertise of colleagues in Austin? Can a mid-level executive in Chicago toss out a proposal for a new line of business -- and trigger a companywide conversation that turns the idea into something real?

Context Integration is a fast-growing Web-solutions company based in Burlington, Massachusetts. It has compelling answers to all those questions, and the answers start with a $10 million knowledge- management system -- a computer network that stores best practices, tracks new ideas, fields questions, and operates as a kind of group mind. It is the killer app in an organization that understands that the most powerful weapon in business is a great idea. "We have positioned ourselves on the frothing part of the knowledge wave," explains Bruce Strong, 43, vice president of strategic services, who is one of the company's four founders. "If we're not sharing ideas with one another, with our clients, and with our partners, we're in deep trouble."

Context is in anything but deep trouble. The company employs 200 consultants, all trained to tackle the most demanding challenges in the world of e-commerce technology. They build high-volume Web sites that enable companies to sell products, to trade commodities, and to manage financial risk. And they build those sites fast. A Context project relies on short, intense development cycles (each lasting three to six months) and comes with a fixed price (usually less than $1 million). Every year since 1993, Context has doubled its annual revenues. This year, its staff will nearly double as well, to about 350 people. That's the power of competing on ideas.

To be sure, plenty of companies have built electronic repositories of best practices and customer information. But most of these databases involve the electronic equivalent of musty library shelves. Context's system, on the other hand, functions like a central nervous system -- a system that connects staffers working in eight offices and in a couple dozen client sites nationwide. As consultants execute their projects, the network steers them to resources and experts that might be of help. Every day, it distributes articles and tips to employees who might find them relevant. When a problem arises, the network tracks down the people who are best qualified to solve it. "Lots of companies try to do knowledge management and then fail -- because they don't understand that knowledge management has to be an enterprisewide priority," says Pete Solvik, CIO of Cisco Systems and a Context board member. "At Context, knowledge is a core strategy. It's embedded in the culture."