Howard mentioned this week’s cover story of BusinessWeek, “The Power Of Us,” a few days ago here.

This long article, which covered all the new Internet collaborative technologies we are using today, from free phone calls using Skype to file-sharing, blogs, wikis and social networking services, is a must-read one.

One of these collaborative technologies attracted my attention. InnoCentive is a web-based community matching 80,000 independent scientists (the “solvers”) to relevant R&D challenges facing leading companies (the “seekers”) from around the globe.

This column contains more details about how the InnoCentive collaborative system works.