“Integrating objective thinking from top industry leaders, innovators, and leading academics, as well as the Logica community of consulting experts to gain in-depth insight, will enable us to spot trends ahead of time for our clients. Providing them with a way to read the market will offer them an additional competitive advantage,” commented Amanda Mesler, Chief Client Officer, Logica. “Consensus Point brought us a technology platform and market-leading solution to create a dynamic collaborative forum.”

Logica FutureScope is the name of the Logica prediction market to guide the provocative and insightful observations regarding the ecosystem in order to enhance business growth and productivity. The predictions are focused around sustainability, future IT and cloud services, and security. You are invited to join us to offer your thoughts at www.logicafuturescope.com

“We are thrilled to be working with Logica on their thought leadership initiatives,” said Linda Rebrovick, Consensus Point’s CEO. “We are confident our unconventional capabilities will offer Logica and their customers a uniquely rapid and robust lens into the future, which could never be accomplished with traditional research methods. Prediction Markets are the new leader in modelling social intelligence-based perspectives on any degree – on any scale.”

About Consensus Point, LLC – Consensus Point, is the leading provider of enterprise prediction markets serving corporations and government. Consensus Point helps their customers tap into the intellectual capital of their most valuable assets, their employees and customers, to reduce the risk of uncertainty, improve revenue through accurate forecasts of products and services, and manage projects with immediate insight into future completion dates and budgets. For more info, please visit www.consensuspoint.com.

About Logica – Logica is a business and technology service company, employing 39,000 people. It provides business consulting, systems integration and outsourcing to clients around the world, including many of Europe’s largest businesses. Logica creates value for clients by successfully integrating people, business and technology. It is committed to long term collaboration, applying insight to create innovative answers to clients’ business needs.

Logica is listed on both the London Stock Exchange and Euronext (Amsterdam) (LSE: LOG; Euronext: LOG). More information is available at www.logica.com.

Contacts:
Linda Rebrovick
615-319-2034
linda@consensuspoint.com

Louise Fisk, Logica
+44 (0)7798 857770
louise.fisk@logica.com

So what are prediction markets? Prediction markets generally involve the trading of binary options. You may know what options are (the right but not the obligation to purchase a given thing), and the benefits of using them (nonlinear payoff profile i.e. fixed premium/cost vs variable profit). But binary options work a little differently, the standard binary option pays $1 if a specified event occurs by or on a specified date – otherwise it pays $0.

For example ipredict has a contract on the US Fed increasing interest rates by November (here): “FED.INCR.NOV10”. This contract pays $1 if the Fed increases interest rates on or before the 4th of November 2010.

You can both sell and buy binary options. So using the previous example, if you believe the probability of the US Fed increasing rates on or before the 4th of November is greater than 0 then you would buy contracts (e.g. if you bought a contract at $0.50 and the Fed increased rates before expiry you would receive $1).

Likewise if you believed that there was no way the Fed would lift rates this year then you could sell short the contract. So for example if it were trading at $0.50 then you would sell a contract for $0.50 and on expiry if the event did not happen you would get to keep the $0.50. But of course the converse is true, if the event did occur then you would have to pay $1 to the holder of the contract, but this would be offset by the $0.50 you sold it for.

If you want to participate in a public prediction market driven by our Foresight platform, check out Logica’s FutureScope project.

The CAPS model itself, based on predictions in the financial markets, is pretty interesting.

Milt Capps, who covers the local venture beat with enthusiasm, covered the new partnership in a wide-ranging profile of Consensus Point earlier today:

[Consensus Point CEO Linda] Rebrovick told VNC the Logica connection creates “a global footprint for Consensus Point,” in that Logica is believed to be the “first example of a global business service company offering a public insight and prediction market,” open to 40,000 Logica employees, Logica clients, subject-matter experts and most others who register at the FutureScope site launched earlier today.

Logica will initially use the FutureScope market to support clients exploring an array of “sustainability” issues and themes. Logica’s global information technology and business services are offered to enable clients to pursue the opportunities and problems they discover.

Logica just completed a rebranding initiative that involved an overhaul of their website. We’re impressed by both the breadth and depth of their thinking that has gone into their vision for themselves in the future, and we’re excited to see what the power of a high-profile predictive market might reveal more broadly.

Stay tuned to this space for more information in the near future. In the meantime, contact us if you’ve recently discovered the power of prediction markets and want to leverage the power of Foresight.