During the 12-week-long program, interns participated in regular brainstorming sessions, shared ideas with IBM scientists, conducted market and customer analysis, and attended regular status meetings with mentors. Senior management were given weekly presentations of progress.

Perhaps most important, the students were given freedom to move boundaries. "From the day they start they are encouraged to challenge ideas, come up with ideas; many times they reinvent projects," says Roche. "We've had some fantastic results."

"One aspect of the internship program is the fact that the projects are not defined in detail," says O'Gorman. "The students are given an idea and the freedom to do what they wish with that idea. The lack of clearly defined end points gives the students and mentors great scope for investigating new possibilities and ideas, and thus encourages innovation." In the first few weeks of the internship, students do a lot of research, connect with others and build on existing work. "Rather than starting from scratch, we say, 'Look around IBM, talk to people at IBM. Can you use existing components and build upon that?' so rather than starting from the beginning, they can concentrate on linked value," says Roche. That students talk with people in other industries has great benefit for IBM itself. "From IBM's point of view, we get to work with new partners and with people in industries we wouldn't have before," says Roche. "And just bringing together the various people from all these [partners] really helps foster innovation."

Indeed, the innovations that result from Extreme Blue projects rely heavily on teamwork and soft skills. "The nature of our project (and Extreme Blue in general) requires extensive collaboration between the technical students, business students, mentors and Extreme Blue alumni," says Edward Mackle, who was an intern on the PodSmart team and is now a Global Web Architecture Consultant at IBM Global Services. It's not easy getting four people who have never met to face many challenges along the way to developing a new product, he says. "You have to work as a team if the project is going to be a success, and that is a key reason for the success of PodSmart."

In response to the challenge of creating personal programming, the interns generated an application that's built on Lotus Notes 8 (which is built on the IBM-developed and open-source Eclipse Java platform). The interns created a framework to connect different data sources and worked with a third party to translate text into audio.