I had a chat with the well-informed Jeff Patmore who's head of strategic university research at BT's Adastral Park research labs this week about some of the work BT was doing with MiT in Boston. One of the developments he discussed that MiT is excited about is the work that's well underway on developing a new programming tool called Scratch.

Scratch is aimed at the young and is a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art -- and share your creations on the web.

It's designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills. As they create Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also gaining a deeper understanding of the process of design.

It's not much of a stretch to see this being extended and adopted by organisations to generate business innovation perhaps not too far into the future.

Some education groups are already having some fun using it.