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 has done it again! On Monday, we blogged about Football Futures accurately predicting that RGIII would win the Heisman trophy four days before the announcement. Today, we’d like to share some of the other predictions that we have made lately using consumer market research panel groups. In early November, our research markets accurately predicted both Black Friday sales increases as well as Thanksgiving holiday travel increases from 2010 to 2011.

We are never surprised when our markets make accurate predictions, but we love to share our results with those who might not be as familiar with the power of prediction markets as we are.

Whether determining consumer preferences or predicting the probability of a future outcome, prediction markets source information from the crowd both efficiently and accurately. Because prediction markets rely on respondents making judgments rather than on a representative sample giving their opinions, they can provide real-time answers much more quickly and at a lower cost than traditional surveys.

Our research clients are finding more and more to appreciate about the flexibility and timeliness of prediction markets in helping them provide their clients with information. If you’re interested in learning more about our consumer research markets, please go to our website: www.consensuspoint.com.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.