The big ideas are deceptively simple. Tim Berners-Leethought it would be neat to easily access information anywhere on a network of computers, so he created the World Wide Web. Jerry Yang and David Filo built an index for the Web. Pierre Omidyar turned the humble Web site into a garage sale. Jeff Bezos thought the Web needed its own Wal-Mart.

Even on an everyday level, the Internet Economy is idea-driven. The technology has made possible new ways of doing business, but taking advantage of the possibilities requires a lot of invention. It is the creative process of capitalizing on new ideas - as well as the possibility of Big Money - that's drawing the best and the brightest to the Web business.

The critical importance of ideas has prompted us to create a new section of the magazine: Intellectual Capital. With sophisticated think pieces, book reviews and profiles, Intellectual Capital will cover the world of economic and business thinking. We'll keep it serious and engaging, steering away from simple formulas and the lists of "new rules" that are so popular among would-be Net business gurus.

It's a happy coincidence that the launch of this section coincides with the publication of Lawrence Lessig's new book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. Admittedly we're a bit biased - Lessig, a professor at Harvard Law School, is a columnist for The Standard - but Code towers above the year's Internet books as a truly original and intellectually stimulating work.

Lessig's nuanced arguments - that "code is law," that self-governance is not the answer for the Net, that values matter more than regulation - develop chapter by chapter into crystalline ideas about constitutional law and the Internet.

To people like Lessig, ideas matter. The Constitution is, at its core, an idea about governance. Lessig reveals the ideology behind debates over privacy, free speech and intellectual property online, as well as the conceptual thinking that needs to happen in what is still a formative period in cyberspace law.

We're also pleased to introduce a column by Nicholas Carr, senior editor of the Harvard Business Review, who this issue documents the subtle shift in the management lexicon from strategy to business models. Also, the new Syllabus section sits in on Larry Downes' E-Business Strategies class at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. If you want rules, read the Ten Commandments. If you want ideas to feed your business, read on.