Consensus Point partner and client, international consulting firm Logica, has just released the results of their latest prediction market research about cloud computing. The experts at Logica are leveraging this market intelligence to assist organizations with the best solutions to maximize cloud computing in their business. Download the Logica FutureScope Cloud Research at http://www.logica.com/we-are-logica/media-centre/factsheets/2012/cloud-research-using-logica-futurescope/.

Over a 6 week period, Logica used Consensus Point’s prediction market platform to engage their employees, their customers, leading academics and key decision makers to better understand and predict the future of the cloud. The market, named “Logica FutureScope”, aggregated the disparate opinions of 100s of cloud and business experts and highlighted the factors that are both driving and inhibiting the growth of cloud today. This valuable market research includes future trends and insights on many critical areas, such as the impact of security events on the demand for cloud services.

Logica was looking for new ways to engage and source the “wisdom of the crowd” in order to better understand the direction of future trends. Consensus Point’s prediction market provides them with an environment that encourages insightful debate and contributes to true thought leadership.

If you’re interested in learning more about how our prediction market software can help put your company’s finger on the pulse of market research, innovation and thought leadership, contact us at sales@consensuspoint.com.

From the Obama campaign’s successful use of Facebook and social media to scale his campaign and support his win in the 2008 election to the advent of the Arab Spring, the way that humans interact has been fundamentally changed by the internet and the rise of social networking. The market research industry has begun to reflect these changes.

Focus groups and surveys have been online for years, but companies have been slow to shift their focus from what researchers are calling “Me” research to “We” research that uses the wisdom of the crowd to gain valuable insights into consumer groups.

At Consensus Point, we see the value that Prediction Markets add to the research process as a way to gain access to collective insights. They represent the next wave of market research innovation focusing on the “We”, but they rely on methods that are vastly different from traditional market research and can be quite a leap initially.

The good news is that Prediction Markets have been proven time and again to be as accurate or even more accurate than traditional research techniques including polls, surveys or monadic concept tests. This is because they rely on people’s judgments of others rather than on people’s understanding of themselves. Academic research has shown that humans, as a rule, are quite brilliant at noticing what others are doing and predicting their behaviors but tend to have blinders on when it comes to understanding their own motivations. Prediction markets harness our innate observational talents by asking respondents not “what they would want or would do”, but by asking them to make a prediction about “what others would want or would do”. This a simple but powerful difference between prediction markets and traditional market research methods and explains how prediction markets can be so accurate with a smaller sample and less target market representation.

The 2009 paper, “Me-to-We Research”*, proves that Prediction Markets are:
1. As accurate as Monadic testing with a correlation of 0.91 versus top quartile Monadic testing
2. More discriminating than Monadic testing with the ability to separate good from average ideas
3. Better at identifying potential breakthrough ideas
4. Comparable across markets and categories

Prediction Markets offer numerous benefits to research because in addition to providing better data, the small sample sizes that they require provide time and cost savings to research companies and their clients. If you are interested in finding out more about how Prediction Markets can help your business, please contact us at info@consensuspoint.com.

*Kearon, John and Earls, Mark. “Me-to-We Research: From Asking Unreliable Witnesses about Themselves to Asking People What They Notice, Believe and Predict about Others.” ESOMAR (2009).

Consensus Point would like to thank all of our customers, partners, and friends for a wonderful 2011, and we are already predicting that 2012 will bring even more exciting opportunities.

2011 has been an amazing year for us at Consensus Point. We were excited to expand our team, including the addition of three outstanding managers and VPs, Lead Software Architect, Jason Vowell from Apple, VP of Development Brian Evans from FanLab and Ashton Brand Group, and Marketing Manager, Hayley Hovious from E.J. Gallo Winery. And we launched a sports public market, Football Futures, with Gannett and the Tennessean. This public facing market successfully predicted the Heisman Trophy winner days before it was announced and has successfully provided a new way for Tennessean readers to engage with the paper.

Additionally, Consensus Point won numerous awards in 2011. Of notable recognition was being named to the Nashville Post “Tech Top 25!” Our CEO Linda Rebrovick was also recognized as a Nashville Business Journal “Technology Power Leader”, one of Nashville’s most powerful women by the Nashville Post, and as a YWCA Woman of Achievement, and still found the time to do numerous interviews, including an interview on board governance with Corporate Board Member.

And our clients continue to do amazing work with prediction markets as well. We are proud to highlight the work of Logica, a leading global, UK- based consulting firm, for the 2011 results of LogicaFuturescope. This public market generated some valuable and insightful insights about the future of Cloud Computing for their clients and consultants! Please let us know if you are interested in the latest LogicaFutureScope Cloud Computing predictions.

We can truly say that 2011 has been memorable, and all of our predictions indicate that 2012 will be even better. Happy New Year!

Consensus Point and Gannett’s Football Futures market is proving the power of prediction markets once again. Days before the announcement was made that Robert Griffin III had won the 2011 Heisman Trophy, Football Futures was clearly predicting RGIII would be taking home the prestigious award. We were thrilled when our friends at The Tennessean felt that the prediction provided by the Football Futures market were interesting enough to appear in the Saturday, December 10, edition of the Tennessean’s sports section. See the chart they used below.

For those of us in the business of predicting the future, results such as these are not surprising at all. Prediction markets have been proven time and again to be more accurate than polls or surveys. Their ability to uncover information and aggregate the knowledge that is dispersed within the crowd is unparalleled. Because those in the market are asked to invest in predictions where they feel most confident, the collected information is not only much richer than that produced by surveys or polls but is also available in real-time when used for forecasting or business intelligence.

We are excited to be working with Gannett and the Tennessean to produce a public prediction market that is raising prediction market awareness among a much wider audience. If you are interested in learning more about prediction markets and their application in either the enterprise or research space, go to our website. If you want to see a market in action or if you just want to see how good you are at predicting the future, take a look at Football Futures.

Do you think you know who will win the the Big 10 Championship game? Are you positive you know who will be the new coach at Ole Miss?

Consensus Point is getting into the football spirit this season. We’re teaming up with multimedia company Gannett, and The Tennessean, to host a new kind of game. Football Futures launches today and will let football fans put their football knowledge to the test by giving them the opportunity to make predictions throughout the college and NFL playoff and bowl seasons.

We are thrilled that when Gannett needed a new way to “inform, inspire, and entertain,” they turned to Consensus Point. Football Futures will not only provide a new opportunity for Tennessean readers to engage with the publication online but will also introduce prediction markets to a much wider audience.

The Football Futures market will focus exclusively on college and NFL games and will offer players the chance to win great prizes and show off their predictive powers. The competition is sure to be heated. We can’t think of a more fun use for a prediction market.

Want to show them what you know and win great prizes? Just sign up and start predicting. It’s easy to register and free to play.

We are excited about a new book on innovation that has recently been released. The Open Innovation Marketplace by Alph Bingham offers a new perspective on a very timely subject, one that is near and dear to our hearts. We have been following Alph for quite some time because he has long been a proponent of the value of prediction markets as efficient aggregators of knowledge and helpful tools for innovation.

In his new book, Alph provides a new perspective on “meta” innovation, the practice of innovating on innovation and walks the reader through clear case studies from the innovator’s perspective. We highly recommend The Open Innovation Marketplace because of its practice-based model. Alph includes both a playbook on Implementation as well as a playbook on building a “challenge” based or modular organization that invites more effective innovation. Alph defines a challenge as a way of packaging work and sizing it appropriately in a way that enables people to collaborate and focus on the task and makes it portable so that it can be worked on outside of the organization.

At its heart, The Open Innovation Marketplace aims to attack established beliefs around how knowledge is tapped for innovation. We know from experience that prediction markets are one very powerful way for enterprises to tap into these additional knowledge networks.

If you would like more information on The Open Innovation Marketplace, check out YourEncore’s recent interview with Alph:

At Consensus Point, we applaud the fact that GE has turned to “crowd sourcing” as in integral part of the R&D process. We have a long and successful history of working with GE business units in their “Imagination Market” to harness the market intelligence of their employees to identify new innovative services and products.

Now, GE has reached out to the market intelligence of their consumers by launching GE’s Healthymagination Challenge. Their $100 million investment in R&D and social business stands to change the ways that enterprises innovate in today’s globally connected economy. In a recent article from Forbes.com, “GE’s $1 Billion Cancer Project: Raising the Bar on Social Business“, Forbes points out that GE is choosing to forego traditional ROI metrics as they invest $100 million in an effort to promote a new culture of innovation. In many ways, they are putting their money where their mouth is and are taking a giant leap forward to support a new model for innovation.

For those companies that choose to look to the crowd as GE has done, there has to be an understanding of the tools needed to achieve success. Prediction markets and preference markets are examples of just such tools. Backed by powerful algorithms, prediction and preference markets provide structure for the innovation process. They are extremely useful for capturing ideas, sorting ideas, and for engaging a diverse audience in a social dialogue about those ideas. Without such tools, companies can quickly become overwhelmed when they open their innovation pipeline up to the crowd.

At Consensus Point, we offer not just the tools but also a consultative approach that has led our clients to success. To learn more about our work with GE or about our innovation process, we invite you to explore our site.

Consensus Point is in the Nashville Post’s Tech 25 (”Middle Tennessee’s Brightest IT Ventures”) for 2011! We are so proud to be included among such premier and outstanding Nashville technology companies as Edo Interactive, Capital Confirmation, Emma, HCA IT&S, and HealthStream.

We applaud Nashville Post for recognizing the importance of the growth of technology ventures as Nashville builds its reputation as one of the nation’s top cities for tech entrepreneurs. Because of this growing emphasis on technology entrepreneurs, the inclusion of Consensus Point in this elite group is especially rewarding and exciting for our team!

As always, Nashville Post said it best when they summed up our offering, “The simple goal of Consensus Point is to reduce the risk of uncertainty—a much needed service in today’s world of ever—present market flux.”

You have to be a subscriber to read the whole thing, but here’s the rest of our excerpt:

Since CEO Linda Rebrovick took over the leadership of Nashville-based Consensus Point in 2009, big-name clients like General Electric, Best Buy and others have signed on for the company’s enterprise prediction markets products.

The idea behind the Consensus Point brand is to help companies reduce the risk of uncertainty and improve revenue by more accurately forecasting projects, products and services. Prediction markets provide insight to a company’s management by synthesizing the previously untapped knowledge derived from employees, customers and business partners—knowledge then used to aid the prediction analysis.

Consensus Point is excited to announce Linda Rebrovick, our CEO and Chair, HealthStream Board Governance Committee, visited the NYSE as a guest on Corporate Board Member’s “This Week in the Boardroom“. TK Kerstetter, President, Corporate Board Member (CBM), a NYSE Euronext company, interviewed Linda on her perspectives of successful Board Governance. Other impressive and notable industry leaders who have also been guests on this premiere show with TK include Denise Morrison, President & CEO, Campbell Soup Co., Philip Lochner, Former SEC Commissioner & Current Director, and Duncan Niederauer, CEO, NYSE Euronext, among others.

Linda’s experience serving as a Director on several public boards, including HealthStream and Pinnacle Financial Partners, KPMG LLP, uniquely qualifies her to speak on this important topic. In the interview, Linda speaks briefly but passionately about her work at Consensus Point (which we love!) and discusses valuable ideas to identify qualified board candidates with diversity of thought and experience.

The diversity of board members is important—not just diversity of background and expertise—but also diversity of thought and experience that come from having a board that brings diversity of gender and race. There are many qualified candidates so the nominating committee must find and recommend the outstanding directors who meet the skills needs, bring diversity of thought, and fit within the board and company culture. For example, Linda specifically recommends the following organizations to provide qualified women candidates: Inter Organization Network (ION), Womens Busines Leaders in US Healthcare (WBL), and Women’s Corporate Directors (WCD).

At Consensus Point, we are very proud of Linda’s recent honors recognizing her efforts in our business, community and boards. Linda has been named to the Academy for Women of Achievement, YWCA; Most Powerful Women, the Nashville Post; and Power Leaders in Technology, Nashville Business Journal. And that’s just in 2011! Her track record of leadership, sound management, and good governance have doubtless added value to every board on which she’s served. We are fortunate to work with her every day to spread the word about prediction markets and are proud that her talents can now be shared with a larger audience.

Click here to watch Linda on “This Week in the Boardroom.”

It’s that time again, election time. Prediction markets are back in the spotlight as the political arena heats up for Presidential elections. More and more people from pundits to professors are trying to predict what the future will hold.

Robin Hanson, Consensus Point’s Chief Scientist and the “Father of Prediction Markets,” is speaking today at the University of Western Ontario’s Political Economy Research Group Conference on a panel entitled, “Can Social Science Predict Accurately: the Case of Elections.” Robin will be focusing on what social science can actually predict with accuracy and what is beyond its reach. Robin will, of course, put special emphasis on prediction markets and how they can be utilized as a powerful tool for predicting future events.

Over the coming year, as the final election draws closer, we expect to see many more of these types of conferences. Stay tuned!