Last week, we attended the Front End of Innovation conference in Boston. We went in part because the agenda looked interesting but also because we were pleased and proud to see two of our customers—Tina Brown-Stevenson of Ingenix and Rami Levy of Motorola—as presenters/panelists.

We enjoyed Tina’s presentation on prediction markets, and we’re glad that someone reported back to the FEI blog about her presentation:

In a solid FEI Champions presentation to complement James Surowiecki’s keynote address, practitioner Tina Brown-Stevenson, Sr. VP Innovation and Information Group at Ingenix, talked through the implementation of a prediction market at Ingenix. As a lead-in to the details of the specific practical application developed at Ingenix, Ms. Brown-Stevenson drew upon examples from Mr. Surowiecki’s book The Wisdom of Crowds to outline the foundational philosophical elements for Ingenix’s overall approach.

We won’t complain when a neutral third party favorably compares us to Surowiecki. Tina shared some findings from several prediction market uses and confirmed that the size of the crowd is not what is important— as markets can be accurate with as few as 24 participants. Tina confirmed what Surowiecki talks about in his book— it is the independence and diversity of the crowd that enables prediction markets to be on average more accurate than a subject matter expert. Tina also shared the Ingenix approach to adjusting the interface to their constituent needs. While many public companies, such as Best Buy and Motorola, have found the traditional stock metaphor to be adopted well within their cultures, we adjusted the Ingenix interface to something easily understandable for Ingenix participants, both internal and external. Demonstrates the flexibility of our Foresight platform!

For Rami’s presentation, he shared his notes with us from the panel on innovation adoption. He described Motorola’s idea collection system and explained why an idea market was needed: to identify the best ideas by leveraging the “crowd.”

For Motorola, the value of our Foresight platform boils down to three ‘Rs’ in the enterprise:

• rewards: mostly intrinsic, e.g., collaboration, helping the company, helping others, forming relationships, learning)
• recognition: via leader boards in the market and built-in social media tools
• recreation: fun, like a game; easy to use with low barriers to entry; competition; social media access to enable “viral” messaging.

If you’d like a sense of the kind of bottom line value these three Rs offered Motorola, CFO.com has covered that topic.

We’re glad we went to the conference, and we’re glad that two of our customers are on the front end of innovation through their use of Foresight.