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.

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.

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!

Regular readers of this blog know that we’re fans of James Surowiecki and the popularization of the concept of crowdsourcing. And as creators of an innovation management platform—Foresight—we also monitor rich sources of innovation like TED. This year, Chris Anderson introduced us to the concept of crowd accelerated innovation.

Seth Godin has nicely summarized and extended the thesis of Chris’s talk:

The idea is one of those big ones, a simple one that will stick with you for a long time… Online video radically changes the reach and speed of the improvement cycle. Things like dance, snowboarding and TED talks keep getting better, and faster, because artists see the best and improve on it. Even more than that, it requires you to top what’s out there, or you’ll be ignored.

Now it’s our turn because we have a slightly different take. Chris’s talk focuses on how web video is accelerating the interpretive and creative process for people the world over. His examples are strong enough that we’re inclined to agree, but it’s not just video; it’s ideas. YouTube provided a remarkable interactive market for web video. Uploading and viewing were just the beginning. Now video is being recut, reedited, and remixed to create new movie trailers, music videos, and tutorials.

Our Foresight platform provides the same, fully participatory experience for our customers who leverage it. The crowds of employees who become participants in our customers’ markets are getting better at their jobs, sometimes because of the extent of web video. They’re digesting and communicating ideas all the time. And there’s no way that a single manager or even a top management team can possibly distill from the creative energy the best ideas with enough guidance to know what’s best, when it should be applied, and how soon it will work without help. Foresight is that help. It’s an example of managed crowd accelerated innovation.

After you’ve honed your dance skills from YouTube (in your office with the door closed, presumably) and you want to accelerate innovation in the enterprise, you’ll want to contact us.

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.