Brains As a Service (BAAS) - Brains on rent

Is there a scope to offer brains on rent?

There are so many interesting innovations we hear lately especially in the Business-to-business space where enterprise services can be rendered as a utility (like electiricity, water, etc) without assuming ownership of resources & capabilites (power plant, river, engineers, etc...) and their risks (issues in dealing with resource & capabilities).

Think about few such themes:

1. "Cloud computing" where IT processing power is rendered as a utility service. Imagine something similar to electricity. We dont care who produces it, how it is distributed and how it is transmitted. All I care is I plug into a electric socket when I need power for my laptop and I get it. I pay a fee for it. I like the baby steps of Amazon here with their EC2 (Elastic clound computing) platform.
2. "Software as Service": Amazing feature to offer software as a service to clients. The client does not have to bother about infrastructure, software license, supporting the application and so on. All he needs is the IT information service rendered to it on paying rental for such a service. Good examples www.salesforce.com, Sugar CRM, SAP Business By Design???


All the above have a viable business to be made on the "long tail" of clients who need simple service at utility rates, without having to bother about the INfrastructure, Software, people to support and so on. Lot of business to be made out there it seems.

In similar light, can we lend our brains to enterprises to solve their productive problems? A kind of Brain as a Service model. Ofcourse, some of us can make a living out of it and that too a prosperous one at it. I guess, this is what Consultants and IT engineers off late do it seems, but by being part of a consulting firm or a enterprise. Imagine if clients can lend the brains of just the individuals and not contract out with companies/firms/enterprises and put them to productive use. All this, without being encumbered with large companies/firms/enterprises out there...Why should I have to go to consulting companies (like Mckinsey, BCG, etc) or Service providers (Accenture, HP, IBM, etc.) to hire the people they have. If I know that all I want is specific talent from people and not the encumbrance of these companies....

Some contractors out there have already doing this like for e.g. teamlease...are there business more companies out there that work on similar model? I contract with individuals not with companies then....

Maybe my idea up there is quiet raw! on the edges of being incoherent or senseless :-)....