By Julie Schlosser

    Google’s Megan Smith, Vice President of New Business Development, offered up a fresh approach to cost cutting during Fortune’s Most Powerful Women conference. It’s sort of a twofer — improve the bottom line by bringing employees into the conversation.

    “Patrick Pichette [Google’s CFO] said we needed to save a half billion dollars,” Smith said. It was shortly after the crisis — the economy was cratering and the company needed to reduce spending. Pichette wanted general cost-cutting ideas from across the company, so he posted the request on Google Moderator, the company’s collaboration tool.

    “It’s a form of crowdsourcing,” said Smith, who now oversees Google.org. “It’s a simple tool. You put suggestions in and people can vote. It allows the good ideas to rise up.” Not surprisingly, Googlers (GOOG) responded. “We got hundreds of millions [of dollars worth] of actionable ideas,” added Smith.