I'm always attracted to ideas that question conventional wisdom. So, I sat up and took notice of the latest story filed on the Australian Business Foundation's online forum, Tales from Silicon Valley, by business journalist, David Forman – who has recently returned to Australia after two years in San Francisco.

This story explored why Australia is not perceived to be in the same league as the United States in the new economy stakes – notwithstanding our credible economic performance and growth record, and the gloss coming off high tech investments in the USA over recent months.

David Forman's message was that the measure of a new economy is not just how many dotcom companies are being created. It is about the degree to which the new possibilities being opened up by IT and internet businesses are being adopted in the wider business community.

Forman quoted an anecdote recounted by Scott McNealy, Chairman and CEO of Sun Microsystems about the dynamism and productive new businesses spawned by his swapping of business ideas and insights with Jack Welsh, Chairman and Chief Executive of General Electric, whose corporate leadership is legendary.

McNealy, who is on the Board of GE, advised Welsh to wire all its light bulbs to GE light bulb factories through the internet. That way, McNealy said, the lights in remote buildings could tell the factory when they were about to blow, a light could be produced to replace them and be dispatched, along with a map to the location of the faulty product and an invoice. In one move, GE would have gone from a light products manufacturer to a lighting services company, and made it extremely difficult for rivals to steal its clients.

This is a classic case of knowledge diffusion, of person to person networking that crosses industrial sectors. It's the new knowledge economy at work.

It shows us that companies right across the economy must take advantage of fresh opportunities and new thinking and convert these to an international competitive advantage.

But, Australia has a major obstacle in doing this. We don't have the critical mass of people, ideas and money on our doorstep. We are out of the loop. There are no Scott McNealys in our neighbourhood with whom we can brainstorm and incubate new imaginative business endeavours that can be bankrolled and test marketed in short order.

So, here's where David Forman abandons conventional wisdom by suggesting that Australia should actually encourage our brain drain to places like Silicon Valley. He argues that the value of Silicon Valley lies less in its inventive information industries and products and more because it operates as a hothouse of the best start up companies and the entrepreneurs and financiers who create and sustain them.

Exporting Aussies into this environment would allow its entrepreneurial culture to rub off on them. Exposure to new ideas and opportunities; learning how to develop start-ups and to commercialise blue sky ideas; experimenting; meeting and networking with others. And potentially bringing all this back home and spreading the know-how and the contacts.

It's an engaging idea. In the new economy, maybe by exporting people temporarily, the brain drain can become the brain gain.