When Jack Welsh, the widely admired CEO of General Electric was in Australia recently, he was repeatedly quoted as saying that ideas are the currency of the future - that the winners in the new economy will be old economy companies who have captured the best and brightest ideas people and used their skills to transform the traditional bricks and mortar blue-chips into highly creative, ideas-driven organisations.

He is not alone in that view.

At Saatchi & Saatchi, we dropped the word advertising from our name several years ago. Our goal now is to become the hottest ideas shop on the planet. Those ideas may manifest themselves in advertising, but they may find expression in many ways unrelated to advertising.

For example, we run a biannual global Innovation in Communication competition and part of the prize we offer is the marketing savvy to get those innovations to market quickly. It's a win-win situation - we get to see what's out there first and new products are brought to market more quickly than would otherwise have been possible.

Our most recent winner was a company called Peratech, named after the substance they invented, which can detect, measure, and respond to human touch. Peratech is a lightweight, malleable substance, which in composite form, looks like dark grains of sand. By the light touch of a fingertip, Peratech can be transformed into a metal like conductor that can detect, measure, and respond to human touch on almost any surface.

So, in the future, we can imagine a roll-up keyboard, for instance, or a T-shirt that measures bodily functions.

Now that's a long way from making ads, but is it absolutely relevant to being the hottest ideas shop on the planet? You bet it is. It transforms our vision statement from an idle boast to a living, breathing reality that makes all of us who work there very proud.

As we emerge from the knowledge economy, there is now widespread discussion of the notion of ideas as the currency of the future, and as we emerge, blinking into the sunlight, after the long night of the dot.com revolution, we now know that knowledge in, and of itself, is not the answer to anything. It is the transformatory nature of the ideas applied to that knowledge that creates change, not the knowledge itself.

If the web taught us anything, it's that there's a lot of useless information out there, and for the average punter, it can be pretty daunting trying to figure out what's useful and what's just crap. Now virtually every dot.com has had to stagger off for a bit of a lie-down, and for many, it's terminal, but the learnings from our experience of the last few years are invaluable.

I think Jack Welch is right - it will be the big, old blue chips that will benefit most from these learnings and they have the resources to keep experimenting. The smart ones are already out there, picking up the bruised and battered twenty-something dot com-ers, hosing them down, halving their salaries, and setting them to work again - this time with a much clearer endgame in view.

Now what has any of this to do with productive diversity? Everything - I would argue.

The legacy of the dot com generation is a lot more than Hawaiian shirts and cappuccino machines in the office.

One of the most intriguing aspects of the dot com revolution was that its foot soldiers were very young, both male and female, and that, in Silicon Valley at least, a disproportionate number of them were Indian or Asian – none of these groups have been widely represented at the top levels of business in the past. And this group of people - who seemed not to own a suit between them - managed to create the most amazing stock-market bubble the world has ever seen, and a whole bunch of boring, middle-aged men in blue suits couldn't wait to pelt them with money.

Now the men in blue suits weren't wrong to do this - they recognised that what this ragtag band had in abundance was ideas - something the men in blue suits didn't have a lot of, but could still recognise when they saw it.

It's why Jack Welch is so smart - he realises that the job of management in the new millennium is to recruit, train, promote, and keep ideas leaders. Ideas leaders will rarely be CEO's - management is not what they're good at, but ideas leaders are wealth creators - they are catalysts for change. They are restless and passionate - so they don't want to stay anywhere for very long and the task for management is to prevent them from becoming bored and wandering off.