In addition to following James Surowiecki’s views on the ‘wisdom of crowds’, we also keep up with Ross Dawson–futurist, entrepreneur, and best-selling author. He spoke a few weeks ago at Creative Sydney’s Crowds + Collaboration event, sharing new perspectives.

You can find slides of his talk here, and there’s an elaboration of Dawson’s thinking on crowdsourcing at MyCustomer.com, from an interview after the Sydney event. He distills the state of the market of tools and platforms into six categories:

• Distributed innovation platforms
• Idea platforms
• Innovation prizes
• Content markets
• Prediction markets
• Competition platforms

You might have an idea which was our favorite:

Prediction markets bring together many opinions to predict the future, often based on “stockmarket-type” mechanisms, which provide a value of a particular prediction that you can buy or sell to make points or potentially money as a result of it going the way you correctly predict. One of the longstanding corporate users of this is Oracle. “For enterprise software companies it is notoriously difficult to forecast sales,” explains Dawson. “For many reasons, the sales pipeline that is put into CRM systems is often inaccurate. However, if you then ask the salespeople to predict what the sales are going to be for that quarter and you aggregate all of their opinions, you can get a far more accurate view of what the actual sales are going to be.”

Google is another user of prediction markets, using its employees to predict which of its innovations and new projects are most likely to be successful. “These are tools that actually aggregate many opinions through the classic ‘wisdom of the crowd’ in order to make more effective corporate decisions,” adds Dawson.

Futurists who understand the value of prediction markets must be onto something…

We recently created a partnership with Brightidea, the global leader in on-demand innovation management, to integrate WebStorm as a social front end to the Foresight platform. In combination with Brightidea’s Switchboard for idea and investment evaluation, this partnership offers a complete end-to-end crowdsourcing solution.

As organizations move through later phases of the innovation process, costs and risks increase. Our Foresight platform can help mitigate risks in these later innovation phases and enable your crowd to efficiently and quickly prioritize the best investments that will yield the highest return for your company. In a later stage of Brightidea’s crowdsourcing solution, the ability to accelerate innovation provides a key competitive advantage.

We’re excited about having a successful case study of our open API for Foresight, and we’re also excited about partnering with an industry leader to be able to offer a comprehensive solution to an important customer need in an increasingly complex world, where successfully managing ideas is more important than ever. If you’re as excited as we are, we hope you’ll want to know more.