Yesterday, my friend Jesse posted about an interesting BusinessWeek.com article. The article discusses the unannounced Brickhouse program at Yahoo that is “born out of the notion that Yahoo’s employees come up with ideas for new ventures, but they haven’t had an effective way to execute them.” This sounds fairly similar to Google’s 30-percent time in which employees are encourage to work on side projects that can then be released under the Google name.

At the beginning of December I wrote about how Yahoo and Google should each create their own venture capital companies. A couple days later I mentioned that it would be wrong to do so because that would mean the companies don’t have faith in their internal R&D departments. I guess the alternative is Brickhouse. It sounds like Brickhouse will function like an internal venture capital program. Taken to an extreme, Yahoo could tell programmers “Have an idea? Come work for us and we’ll fund it.” That would be nice! I doubt that the developers will be spending 100% of their time on new projects. If they are, hire me Yahoo!