Wardman said having top researchers aligned closely with customers is a return to the way IBM worked back in the 1960s, when it not only supplied the mainframe computer to NASA for the Apollo moon landing, but routinely sent its top engineers to work on site.

IBM is doing still more. It is incorporating open-source development methods, encouraging cross-propagation through internal events like last September's InnovationJam, and even started to flatten organizational hierarchies, though not as far as Google has notoriously done.