We are very excited to welcome former Apple Online Store architect, Jason Vowell to our team as our lead product architect.

Our CEO, Linda Rebrovick says, “We’re excited to have Jason onboard. His experience and knowledge will enable us to improve our technology and continue our growth into the future. Our next generation software will allow us to deliver accurate answers, quicker and easier than ever before.”

Jason has over 13 years of experience designing and building high-capacity web commerce platforms. He has led strategic business technology initiatives across a diverse group of Fortune 500 companies including IBM, Gap, Macys.com, and Lowe’s. Jason came to us from Apple where he managed a team that was responsible for the architecture, design and implementation of internal tools for the Apple Online Store.

Jason’s primary responsibilities will be to lead the architecture design team to create the next generation of Social Consumer Intelligence products at Consensus Point. We are thrilled that he made the decision to return to Tennessee and are very excited to have him join our team.

Crowdsourcing and gamification are two topics that are gaining more and more traction as ways to solve complicated problems more quickly and cost effectively than ever before. The concepts are still relatively new, but the recent success of of a group of gamers in successfully mapping the protein structure of an AIDS-like protein provides even further evidence that tapping the wisdom of the crowd can yield powerful results. (For the full article)

In the AIDS protein mapping “game,” it took gamers three weeks to solve a problem that had stumped biochemists for a decade. The game posed the problem in a new, different and fun way and provided a conduit for a diverse crowd to provide its knowledge.

Prediction Markets and preference markets provide a similar mechanism for soliciting ideas and tapping into this wisdom using the same gamification and crowdsourcing principles that were used in to map the AIDS protein and could produce similarly amazing results in the business world. We are excited to be at the forefront of such an amazing technological and cultural revolution and are constantly seeking ways to make our software even more fun and engaging.

The Nashville Business Journal has just announced their Power Leaders in Technology, and we were honored that our CEO Linda Rebrovick was named to the group.

Here’s who the Power Leaders in Technology are:

Some are entrepreneurs, and others run large IT departments at major companies in town. Others are venture capitalists and financiers looking to back the next big idea. The common theme is that all are helping grow Nashville’s tech community.

Linda can’t help but be pleased and excited with the recognition she’s been receiving as a leader, but she wants to keep peoples’ focus on the future. With Consensus Point, you can know what’s coming. Just ask us.

We recently unearthed BCG’s 2010 Innovation Report: A Return to Prominence and the Emergence of a New World Order. The report clearly shows that innovation is making a major comeback in the hearts and minds of CEOs and business leaders across the globe, and it’s not hard to see why.

Innovative companies outperform non-innovator companies by 12.4 percentage points. In a global economy, CEOs are facing innovation from all sides.

CEO’s must make innovation a genuine priority if they are to succeed at leading their companies to be true innovators. In order to see real results, they will need to create a culture of innovation and to invest in tools that hasten speed to market times and accentuate their teams’ ability to choose the strongest ideas possible.

Effective innovation relies on a company’s ability to actively evaluate the ideas that it generates. Successful innovators rely on the experts within their organizations to help with this evaluation. Prediction market tools such as Consensus Point’s Foresight platform make it possible to aggregate knowledge from all levels within the organization.

Enterprise 2.0 tools, including prediction markets, are not new. Innovators such as Google and GE have been using them effectively for years to accelerate the innovation process. Consensus Point has helped such companies as GE, Best Buy, and Motorola cut down on their innovation costs.

Consensus Point’s Foresight platform has already been changing the future of innovation in Fortune 500 companies. Our technology is both a prediction market and a social networking obligation that harnesses the collective intelligence of the enterprise to facilitate the innovation process. We work with our clients to increase the ROI of the innovation process.

For more information on prediction markets and on Consensus Point, visit us on the web.

Consensus Point was recently cited in blog post entitled “Fostering Bottom-up Supply Chain Strategy” for Logistics Viewpoints by Steve Banker. In the posting, Banker asserts that utilizing the knowledge of the broader organization will only enhance the process of refining core business strategies. He points out that prediction markets are an excellent way to tap into knowledge that would be difficult for senior management to access otherwise.

We agree wholeheartedly with Banker’s assertion. At the enterprise level, prediction markets directly address and overcome the communication problems that discourage open sharing of ideas and information such as fear of repercussions and bureaucratic frustration. Additionally, they provide a unified platform that offers employees at all levels of the organization an opportunity to be heard and gives management unique access to previously hidden information.

Consensus Point’s Foresight platform is an easy to use yet powerful solution for enterprise users. Its cloud-based program makes it easily access for employees and provides real-time intelligence to decision makers.

Read the whole thing. We can’t thank Steve enough for his mention.

2011 has been an exciting year for Consensus Point, and we are pleased to have received more wonderful news. Our CEO, Linda Rebrovick, has been chosen as one of seven inductees into the 2011 Academy for Women of Achievement. The Academy honors women who, through excellence and leadership in their chosen fields, serve as role models for other women. We at Consensus Point are extremely proud of Linda for having achieved so much in the traditionally male-dominated software industry.

Linda will be honored at the 20th annual Academy for Women of Achievement celebration and induction dinner, presented by YWCA of Nashville & Middle Tennessee and First Tennessee, to be held Tuesday, Oct. 25.

The Consensus Point team is pleased to be featured in an article in the MIT Technology Review entitled “A Futures Market for Computer Security.” The article focuses on the pilot prediction market being run by teams from Carnegie Mellon, Verizon, U.S. intelligence and, of course, Consensus Point as a means of predicting security events. This collaborative effort will utilize the collective wisdom of approximately 250 security experts to create actionable results around computer security concerns.

For more information on the security project, read the article.

For more information about Consensus Point, prediction markets, or how you can harness the wisdom of the crowds to solve your business problems, contact us.

Where is a comprehensive spot on the web to get information about crowdsourcing? We suggest that www.crowdsourcing.org is an informative place to go. Consensus Point is proud to announce that we have once again been included in Crowdsourcing.org’s Crowdsourcing Industry Landscape! Their helpful new infographic navigates the many different applications of crowdsourcing, all of which are a part of their Directory of Sites. The directory includes over 1,000 crowdsourcing and crowdfunding sites. It certainly provides a thorough viewpoint, and we are excited to be a part of it!

In John Kotter’s recent post for the Front End of Innovation blog, he addresses the need for an organizational shift in thought if companies are to be successful at innovating. His solution:

Leaders need to articulate a big, meaningful opportunity that all employees — not just product development or R&D — can get energized about and play an integral part in achieving. This opportunity is about more than increasing bottom line revenue; it represents a chance for the organization to do something with greater external impact.

At Consensus Point, we agree wholeheartedly with this model of engaging the larger community by rallying them around a greater cause. Employee engagement is a critical piece of the innovation puzzle and one that must be solved using several different approaches. Simply introducing a new software or paying lip service to a change in thought is not enough to make change happen. Real change takes hard work and commitment from organizational leaders.

After years of working with Fortune 500 clients, Consensus Point knows what it takes to create employee engagement:

1. Frequent communication from senior management in the form of emails, mentions in meetings, acknowledgement of the participants.
2. Frequent communication of the insights and ideas that are being generated and used by the organization.
3. Clear metrics for managers.
4. A fun gaming element to the experience with recognition and incentives built in.

Consensus Point friend and client, Rami Levy of Motorola, who was a recent keynote speaker at the Front End of Innovation Conference in Boston, puts these ideas into practice. Motorola’s prediction market has improved Motorola’s time to market and increased speed at which the company is able to gather ideas.

If you would like to learn more about how Consensus Point’s Foresight technology helped Motorola and find out more about engaging your employees in the innovation process, click here.

We were pleased to see Linda recently featured in a video interview series hosted by Dean Turney Stevens of the College of Business at Lipscomb University.

Dean Turney Stevens talks with Linda Rebrovick, CEO of Consensus Point, LLC, about prediction markets and how her new business helps clients harness the “wisdom of the crowds” to predict the future.

Mrs. Rebrovick is the Chief Executive Officer at Consensus Point and brings 32 years of executive experience and expertise leading information technology consulting, marketing and sales organizations. At Consensus Point, she is primarily responsible for providing the strategic direction for all business areas and for the overall success of the company.

Mrs. Rebrovick formerly served as VP, Dell Healthcare Sales, EVP and Chief Marketing Officer, BearingPoint, EVP and National Managing Partner, KPMG Consulting and Business Unit Executive, IBM.

She possesses a broad general management background including healthcare, manufacturing, retail and distribution industries. Mrs. Rebrovick’s success has led her to serve on a number of boards, including HealthStream, the Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee, Governor Philip Bredesen’s eHealth Advisory Council, and formerly Pinnacle Financial Partners Board and the KPMG LLP Board. Mrs. Rebrovick is a graduate of Leadership Nashville and former chair of the Nashville Technology Council Board.

She received her bachelor’s degree from the College of Business at Auburn University and was recognized as one of Auburn University’s top 400 women graduates in the past 100 years.