Yes, this was what I meant. I'm not sure what two departments talking would look like, but I do know what people hanging around after a tech talk discussing the subject at hand and brainstorming interesting collaboration ideas looks like.

I'll grant you that the technology Blekko brought to IBM (the crawler) was something that a lot of people who were inside the company were interested in, so there were inbound contacts as well when someone said, "Hey we're doing X and wondering if you can do Y?" And that often lead to a discussion about what crawlers could and couldn't do legally :-) But it also lead to lots of great collaborations on various data sets and projects.

"Companies" are filled with people who talk. The only place I've heard where this is a huge issue (from former and current employees) is Apple where secrecy is pretty rampant. And while every company seems to have some "special" projects that aren't discussed, general conversations seem to be fine.

At IBM there are a lot of really really smart people who have done really cutting edge research which for me, was kind of like being a kid in a candy store :-).