21st Century Organization

GE's Ecoimagination Challenge: The Power of Ideas, Ecosystems and Scale

November 16 I was fortunate to attend GE's event announcing the first winners of their Ecoimagination Challenge that strives to speed solutions to smarter power grids and energy technology. GE CEO Jeff Immelt, Marketing CMO Beth Comstock, VC funding partners and challenge winners were in the room

GE contributed $100m that was matched by 4 venture capital companies to invest in new smart power solutions and companies. The announcement of the first 12 winners, who will receive $55m in funding, generated media buzz including from MarketWatch, the Huffington Post and Fast Company. Meet the winners on the GE Ecoimagination site and watch the announcement video highlights here:

   

Beth Comstock's frank opening remarks set the open tone.  GE understands it doesn't have all the best ideas and (because of it's scale) can play a convening role for smart grid innovation. 

Clear too is GE’s understanding of the power of ecosystems.  GE’s partnering with leading venture capital firms increases a funded companies chances of success. VC’s bring cash and business nurturing expertise while spreading  the ventures reach to an extended investor network. And winners get access to "GE's army of product developers, engineers and sales people".

By crowdsourcing the pool of ideas and energy around the Ecoimagination Challenge are maximized. 4,000 concepts were submitted from across the globe over the course of the 10-week open competition.

Clearly GE is not the first to discover the power of crowdsourcing. Eli Lilly's outsourced research and development program that became InnoCentive dates to 1998; Procter and Gamble has inspired others with Connect and Develop, that CEO Lafley instigated in 2000; and IBM has been using Innovation Jams since 2001. Still GE's Ecoimagination Challenge and the announcement presentations highlight the potential in appropriate openness and the power in creating idea and talent ecosystems to drive innovation.

What's your experience with crowdsourcing for innovation?  What companies and programs impress you?  How impactful do you see the Ecoimagination Challenge will be?

~ Jenny Ambrozek

"Socially Challenged" - Putting the WHO in Enterprise 2.0 at Frankfurt Workshop

Thanks to Bjoern Negelmann and his exceptional team organizing Enterprise 2.0 Summit 2010 I'll be in Frankfurt, October 26, leading a workshop on "Social Networking Culture- Made Simple". 

I'm in outstanding company as Mark Masterson will bring next practice into the room sharing how CSC used Organizational Network Analysis (ONA) to ensure their C3: Connect, Communicate. Collaborate enterprise wide networking platform introduction succeeded.  If you've heard Mark's recent talk at O'Reilly's Open Source Conference (OSCON), you know you can look forward to a thought provoking, bottom-line discussion.

An Information Week article titled "Socially Challenged" (September 27) provides a timely workshop backdrop with:               

"IT's under pressure to deliver Facebook-like social networking inside companies. Yet the biggest worry is getting employees to use it. What's going on?"

The article draws on a suvey of 624 business technology professionals at companies using one or more internal social networking systems, August 2010.

It is recommended reading for insight into both the reality and complexity of implementing enterprise collaboration platforms, and the roles different internal groups want and need to play.

My "Social Networking Culture" Workshop builds from a couple of assumptions that:

1) The Enterprise 2.0 SLATES Andrew McAfee described in 2006 (Search Links Authoring Tags Extensions and Signals) are impacting organizations whether management chooses to face the reality or not.

By empowering individuals to communicate and share information up and down formal organizational hierarchies, across and beyond the organization, Web 2.0 tools are changing the way work gets done and impacting where control lies. Social Tools Impact Organizations

View more presentations from Jenny Ambrozek.

2) The 1980's Xerox Parc research (into how Xerox technicians fixed copiers) that led John Seely Brown and Estee Solomon Gray to write in an article titled "People are the Company" in the inaugural Fast Company magazine that:                         

"Organizations are webs of participation. Change the patterns of participation, and you change the organization.

At the core of the 21st century company is the question of participation. At the heart of participation is the mind and spirit of the knowledge worker. "

~ John Seely Brown & Estee Solomon Gray, "People are the Company" 1995

Through a series of network mapping exercises we apply principles from social network science to planning the people networks essential for collaboration success. (The workshop builds from the Open net∞WORKing Organizations article (2008) co-authored with colleague Victoria Axelrod.)

By focusing on putting the "WHO?" in Enterprise 2.0 initiatives the workshop aims to make your organization a member of the 10% Information Week identified who can say:

"Great: usage is high and we've improved communication."

 

 Source: Information Week, September 27, 2010 p15.

Please join me, hear from Mark Masterson and participate in a day of intentional people network planning at Enterprise 2.0 Summit Frankfurt, October 26.

~ Jenny Ambrozek

Game Change: A Better World, WoW

We are in a constant state of change, contrary to the description proffered by many organization change models.  The challenge I see for organizations is to direct our inherent ability to change and/or speed it up.  Virtual game environments have that potential.

John Kotter wrote in The Heart of Change, too many change initiatives fail because they rely too much on “data gathering, analysis, report writing and presentations” rather than tapping “feelings that motivate useful action”.

Having surveyed numerous successful company change strategies, he concluded 8 stages, not necessarily linear, are required.

1.    Creating a sense of urgency.
2.    Pulling together a guiding team with the needed skills, credibility, connections, and authority to move things along. A coalition.
3.    Creating an uplifting vision and strategy.
4.    Communicating the vision and strategy through a combination of words,    deeds and symbols.
5.    Removing obstacles, or empowering people to move ahead.
6.    Producing visible signs of progress through short-term victories.
7.    Sticking with the process and refusing to quit when things get tough.
8.    Nurturing and shaping a new culture to support the innovative ways.

Just looking around at all the places and ways in which people are constantly engaged in change is enough of an indicator that dramatic organizational change is possible.  And I am more and more convinced it is the failure to tap into the “feelings that motivate useful action” than any other factor. It is the human factor.

Powerful research evidence is corroborating Kotter’s statement, particularly the 3 billion weekly hours we collectively spend frequenting virtual game environments online.

In 2008, I reviewed economist and virtual world researcher Edward Castronova’s, Exodus to the Virtual World: How Online Fun is Changing Reality for Inside Knowledge Magazine.  Most stunning to me was Castronova’s conclusion that more of our physical world practices need to and will borrow from game design, becoming almost seamless with “in world” or virtual world actions.  His equally remarkable estimation of 40% of GDP deriving from virtual environments may look even more enticing post the global financial meltdown and environmental catastrophes (natural and man-made).

Games are where millions of us spend our time.  The most recognizable being World of Warcraft (WoW) and Second Life (SL).

So what is it about virtual world game design that keeps us coming back, to create, collaborate, innovate, share, and perform at such high levels? 

Jane McGonigal charmingly spells it out in Gaming Can Make a Better World; a 20-minute TED presentations. So, sit back and enjoy.  I guarantee you’ll watch a second time.

From her research, a few key behavioral actions gamers generate:

Urgent optimism – for an epic win (sense of urgency)

Social fabric – weave tight relationships in guilds, forums, wikis (coalitions)

Blissful productivity – doing the right level work (short term wins)

Epic Meaning (great missions and visions to pursue)

All adds up to - Super-empowered participants

Coincidentally these five are almost identical to Kotter’s change strategies! Worth noting.

McGonigal is with the Institute for the Future and has designed three public simulation games to meet world sustainability challenges: World Without Oil,
SuperStruct, and March 2010 release of Evoke. 

The Collaboration Curve: Exponential Performance Improvement in World of Warcraft (2009), a Deloitte Center for the Edge white paper, details similar evidence to Castronova and McGonigal, that players “share experiences, tell stories, celebrate, (and analyze) prodigious in-game achievements, and explore innovative approaches to addressing in-game challenges.” The game and the players’ experience levels grow over time in a symbiotic morphing, which the “collaboration curve” demonstrates.  John Hagel III and John Seely Brown first used the term in 2009.

Two challenges of open innovation platforms and other virtual spaces are:

• Teams create tacit knowledge, but have difficulty scaling to large platforms, and in
  

• Scaled environments like Innocentive, many participants share explicit knowledge, but have no means to share tacit knowledge.  

WoW game design by Blizzard has forums, wikis and databases, shared by guilds which enables sharing tacit knowledge quickly.

Both real-time feedback and  “after action performance reviews” of raids, are another critical component to the game.  Constantly learning new skills and gaining new tools has primacy in WoW, but it is as much a collaborative effort as it is individual.

Although I am not a gamer, I have explored Second Life, a virtual world and collaboration platform finding that the learning curve is initially steep.  Avatars are used as personal representations requiring a skill to manipulate separate from any goal or content to be generated.  Thanks to a well-versed SL colleague I was able to move from “barefoot newbie” to "presentable enough" in three hours to give a mini workshop on Social Capital: Glue for Sustainability to a sophisticated group in Cedar Island.

The convergence of mobile technologies, augmented reality, massive multiplayer online games and virtual worlds is moving quickly and quietly. The organizations designing their products and services to use less physical materials will be the winners. One only needs to look to the Virtual Reality Conference of the IEEE or the Federal Consortium for Virtual Worlds Conference to understand the sustainability gains from 3D, virtual materials design for science, medicine, healthcare and military to grasp the competitive value impacts. 

As I wrote in 2008, the … “Implications of [Castronova’s] Exodus for business leaders, marketers – any one involved with organizational learning, innovation and knowledge – are significant. Not from the prosaic manner in which online space is used to conduct business or learning virtually, but rather to understand game design tenets, game behavior, ‘networked graphical sociality’ and how these will change real world expectations.”

~ Victoria G. Axelrod

Peer Financing for Developers & Diaspora: A Glimpse to the Future of Work and Business

May 14 I attended the Peer Financing for Developers event organized by Embarkons Inc CEO Trevor Cornwell and hosted by law firm Cooley LLP in New York.  Against a backdrop of Diaspora's extraordinary success raising funds through Kickstarter,a cadre of smart entrepreneurs representing Grow VC, Chittai, LendFriend and Appbackr explained their companies’ approaches to enabling peer funding of new ventures. Beyond insight into an emerging new industry what left with me was a sense of glimpsing the future.  Here’s why.

With official U.S. unemployment close to 10% (and many people I know “statistics”), the energy and optimism among Peer Financing participants was refreshing. An assumption that the future lay in creating new products and businesses pervaded the room. And that’s good given thriving new businesses is exactly what the U.S. needs. 

The Financial Times May 10 reports that small, young businesses are responsible for most new employment:

"New firms are essential to recovery. From 1980 to 2005, virtually all net new jobs were created by companies less than five years old, and the one to five-year olds created two-thirds of the jobs."

This reality is driven home in research at Deloitte's Center for the Edge showing the continuing declining Return on Assets (ROA) for U.S companies since 1965.

 

Source:  ZDNet from John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison (2009) The Big Shift: Measuring the Forces of Change Harvard Business Review

 

Looking back reminds us that wealth flows to business minded entrepreneurs from the Rothschild’s, Rockefellers and Vanderbilts to the founders of the iconic 20^th century technology companies, IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, Salesforce, eBay, Amazon and Google.

 

The recent downsizing and destruction of full time jobs that came with the financial crisis point to the changing dynamics of employment, to the "eLance economy" as forecast by Tom Malone and Rob Laubacher in their 1998 book and fluid organizations described in The Future of Work (2004).

 

My take away from Friday’s Peer Funding event was not just admiration for the entrepreneurs determined to create thriving businesses and a new peer financing industry but a reminder about vital 21^st century skills. In an uncertain and dynamic economy being entrepreneurial, innovative and able to run a business are essential whether you are in business for yourself or trying to sustain working in an organization.

 

What’s your sense?  Are entrepreneurship, an ability to innovate and run a business even more important skills in this 21st century?  And from what industries will the wealthiest entrepreneurs emerge this century?

 

 

~ Jenny Ambrozek

Why Projects Fail: Realities from the PMINJ Symposium

Monday, May 3, I was a privileged speaker at the Project Manager Institute New Jersey's (PMINJ) Annual Symposium. Suffice to say this was the best managed conference I've ever attended and congratulations to the all-volunteer team that made it possible.

Building on work Victoria Axelrod and I have done  my talk addressed "Stakeholder Engagement & Co-Creation: Reducing Project Risks". Applying what we know from network science I made the case that bringing a network lens to projects, ensuring all stakeholders with diverse perspectives and expertise are engaged and strategically interconnected, is fundamental to a project's success.  Here are my slides:

Stakeholder Engagement & Co-Creation: Reducing Project Risk

View more presentations from Jenny Ambrozek.

Our discussion started with the question: "Why do projects fail?" with answers including:

• Loosely defined requirements
• Too big
• Sponsorship changes
• Scope creep

It was after participants had completed a project network drawing exercise that we were reminded of the "human" dimension in project success:

• The challenge of communication across virtual teams (no face-to-face and body language; operating across time zones)
• Silo mentalities- closed, no information sharing
• Cultural differences
• Competing influences on others.

It's more than a decade since Stowe Boyd identified the emergence of a new breed of software he designated "social tools". "Social business" is the rage but in reality, since the earliest market places, business has run on relationships.

On Monday the hard working, talented PMINJ project managers at the forefront of leading strategically important and complex projects in their businesses, reminded us that structuring organizations to:

• facilitate communication
• incent sharing, and
• align resources with strategic priorities

remains fundamental to success.

What's your experience with project challenges? How important are people and organizational issues to project success?

~ Jenny Ambrozek

Values in Action: Web 2.0

How is web 2.0 values driven? asked one of the participants in a workshop given by Jenny Ambrozek and myself, sponsored by ODNNY.

The question of values strikes at the core of our human and organizational behavior, whether it is face-to-face or online, through any of a host of social media platforms.  Our values underpin our behavior. Behavioral needs about control, privacy, security, anger, freedom, creativity, curiosity, collaboration and a plethora of other needs are rooted in values. The social web makes behavior instantly visible and traceable.  We must dig to understand the underlying values, however.

A recent John Battelle post The Database of Intentions is Far Larger than I Thought struck me as our collective “values in action”.  Granted he is focused more on the technology and platforms, but in raising the “fields and signals” he is exposing far more than simple information retrieval tools.

 Battelle wrote in 2003 about web search as “the database of intentions”

This information represents, in aggregate form, a place holder for the intentions of humankind - a massive database of desires, needs, wants, and likes that can be discovered, subpoenaed, archived, tracked, and exploited to all sorts of ends. Such a beast has never before existed in the history of culture, but is almost guaranteed to grow exponentially from this day forward. This artifact can tell us extraordinary things about who we are and what we want as a culture. And it has the potential to be abused in equally extraordinary fashion. 

The paradox of our digital sociality

The question of values is fundamental to the way organizations approach their stakeholder networks - employees, customers, suppliers, regulators, etc.

I started thinking about the operational questions our participants are wrestling with – how to set social media policies, how to manage resistance to social media, what leadership skills are required, and it got me thinking again about - how is web 2.0 values driven?

Values are one of the four anchors to our approach to building an organizational culture that can sustain its self.  But shared values are often over shadowed by the other three anchors – strategy, structure and systems. Everyone asks, what is the business purpose of your social media strategy, but without surfacing values in action, it still will not be a success.

To be clear, I am talking about organizational values, the deep-seated beliefs and norms from which we operate, not to be confused with economic value.

To set a social media strategy or web 2.0 strategy without reference to the organizational values in operation is asking for failure. The social media strategy may be developed from opposite extremes - as more restrictive than the organizational culture or it may try to be more open than the culture, neither of which will work.  Battelle’s caveat - it (social media) has the potential to be abused in equally extraordinary fashion, is critical to the values discussion.

Take for example, an employee who tweets about a poor customer experience, or a customer who blogs negatively about an organization that does not use interactive media.  My assumption about both of these organizations is that the value in operation, relating to “customers” is not positive or it is weak compared to other values.  A slogan about “customers come first” may exist, but in day-to-day practice, that value is far from reality.   

Fields in the Database of Intentions

Battelle’s expansion of the fields of our intention maps and tracks with two other graphs, Ross Mayfield’s “power law of participation” which we have amended here and "social technographics ladder" of Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li.

All three of these visualizations reveal, in different language, the degrees of our levels of interaction enabled by various social platforms.  However, Battelle's connects most closely to me to our collective values and motivations, our social nature. His NB ...

If you're not viewing your job to be a curator, clarifier, interpreter, and amplifier of the Database of Intentions, you're soon going to be out of business. The Database of Intentions is the fuel that drives media platforms, and as I've argued elsewhere, every business is now a media business.

Organizations seeking to improve their effectiveness, innovation and efficiency using web 2.0 need to once again look at their "values in action" and understand those values underpin strategy, structure and operating systems.  To riff on Battelle, every business is a social business, ergo values based.

~ Victoria G. Axelrod

Open net∞WORKing Organizations: Creating Sustainable Enterprises- ODNNY Pecha Kucha

January 19 I was privileged to join fellow presenters Daniel Doucette, Robyn Stratton-Berkessel, Suzanne Mueller and Victoria Zelin at the OD Network, New York's Pecha Kucha event addressing Sustainability in Organizational Development. 

Thanks to Headshift's Lee Bryant for counsel (via Twitter) on how to prepare for the Pecha Kucha challenge of 20 slides at 20 seconds each:

"Relax. 15-20 secs is longer than you think. It's fun!"

My topic was Open net∞WORKing Organizations: Creating Sustainable Enterprises and here are the slides:

Open net∞WORKing Organizations: Creating Sustainable Enterprises

Building on work Victoria Axelrod and I have done together, and our contributions to The Sustainable Enterprise Fieldbook, 7 requirements are outlined. All relate to creating organizations built on intentional, value creating networks to ensure a constant flow of innovation and adaptation to changing market and environmental conditions. To learn more see Victoria's post "Sustainable Enterprises: Innovation Intervention" and this context article.

I promised to share resources mentioned during the thought provoking table discussions following my talk:

"Why Sustainability Is Now the Key Driver of Innovation" Ram Nidumolu, C.K. Prahalad, and M.R.Rangaswami; Harvard Business Review September 2009 pp. 56-64

"Teaching Executives to See Social Capital: Results from a Field Experiment." Ronald S. Burt and Don Ronchi; Social Science Research, 2007, 36(3), pp. 1156-83

To continue the conversation please join us in the Sustainable Enterprise Network (on Ning).

To share examples of enterprises you consider are showing the way towards sustainable practices, and operating, contribute profiles to Wikisourcing Sustainable Enterprises.

Thanks to ODNNY event organizers Lisa Locke, Barbara Christian and Mark Berns for an exceptional meeting of minds.

~ Jenny Ambrozek

Sustainable Enterprises: Innovation Intervention

Over the years I have wrestled with a graphic to depict what we do when we support an organization catalyze their good ideas into market worthy innovations and depict when value is created.

We have the over all process steps defined which we adapt for each client, but on paper the steps always look deceptively linear for a process which is emergent and in a dynamic business environment. 

It never fails that the question is asked - what is the roi for an innovation intervention? The short answer is immediately. Our premise is the following:

Value is created all along the process from discovery, to growth opportunity or idea generation, to opportunity commercialized.  

 Internally, value is created as employees grapple with developing innovations to adapt to an ever-changing business environment. 

Skills and competencies are developed as employees learn to assess the external business environment, engage stakeholders, utilize network analysis and collaboration tools, enact data driven decision-making and scenario planning. Most organizations view the process of idea creation, as an expense when in fact it is the building of an organization skill and competence, the so-called “intangible asset” made very tangible.  

Over 75% of US GDP comes from "intangibles" and yet we are still trying to figure out means to account for this value created daily by 21st century enterprises. Look to Intangible Assets: Measuring and Enhancing Their Contribution to Corporate Value and Economic Growth: Summary of a Workshop from the National Research Council for some emerging trends.  The section on Firm Measurement of Intangibles, pages 44 - 45 detail examples from Baruch Lev. 

 "So what, according to Lev, is the key information that is needed? First, collecting information about capitalizing R&D on the macro level, as in national accounts, ... is important. On the firm level, capitalizing R&D, while a step in the right direction, is not something that investors will get terribly excited about. What is needed is not haphazard, non-standardized measures, such as employee or customer satisfaction grades, brand values, corporate reputation, or triple bottom line.

Investors want to know about factors that drive the business. What is needed is structured input-output information on performance of the major drivers of enterprise value—these are things that accounting is not yet designed to provide. Lev provided two examples of this type of information, one prevalent in the pharmaceutical and biotech industries, the other in Internet and telecommunications firms. In put-output linkages for these industries involve high levels of R&D. Companies may provide information about the product-pipeline and the outcomes from these programs - how many products they are working on and where they are on the scale of development. These pieces of information are major value drivers of biotech companies. If a company has a few products in an advanced development stage, like Phase II clinical tests, a high value will be generated. If they are all in preliminary stage, a very low value will emerge. Good disclosure, by Lev's definition, is something that relates the R&D to its consequences. Innovation revenue, a percentage of total revenue that comes from recently introduced products, is an extremely powerful measure of innovation, in that it can be indicative of two things. First is the ability to come up with new products and services and bring them to market quickly.

Ability to come up with new products and services and bring them to market quickly are competencies that can be learned. They often lie as "untapped talent" in many organizations waiting to be unleashed through a variety of techniques for generating growth opportunities, filtering for resource allocation, and leadership sponsorship. For example: crowdsourcing, future search gatherings, prediction markets, business plan competitions, are all methods we have written about previously here.

P&G's Connect and Develop and Eli Lilly's spin off InnoCentive lead the way as successful demonstrations of the core competence - ability to come up with new products and services and bring them to market quickly.

Most companies provide information about the target market expected launch date and how much they intend to capture from the market. This information can be directly factored into an evaluation model. The second is something that is somewhat less prevalent. Most Internet and telecommunications companies provide a spectrum of information that explains the market value of the company, starting with the cost of acquiring customers, then the consequences. Subscribers increase in some cases and decrease in others. These variables, along with the churn rate and revenues from new customers—which are analogous to innovation revenue—allow computation of customer lifetime value...When he [Lev] computed customer’s lifetime value, which is the piece of the franchise missing from the balance sheet, it can account for 60-70 percent of the entire difference—just this one intangible.  

External value is created simultaneously as employees interact and learn from stakeholder networks, alliance partners, and customers. A customer's lifetime value is co-created through open networking innovation.
Ultimately, a “value tipping point” is reached and a product or service is realized or commercialized as the innovation intervention progresses thorough stages.  With companies like P&G expecting to generate as much as 50% of new product innovation from crowdsourcing, it rapidly becomes apparent the value creation boundary between external and internal has not only blurred, but occurs earlier than at the point of commercialized output. 

Innovation Interventions are much like our tornado graphic as we see them as an emergent process, disruptive for a short period, a confluence of environmental conditions, much like market forces, and transient. 

The good news is we and others know how to tap the "connected wisdom of stakeholder networks" to unleash innovation in a much more controlled state than a "tornado". It is up to  enterprises to adopt the processes we have described above to remain sustainable.

~ Victoria G. Axelrod

From Crowdsourcing to Collective Intelligence at Work: Organizations are the Key

The Knowledge Innvovation Network (of the University of Warwick Business School) recently convened a diversely thought provoking workshop addressing "Knowledge and Prediction Markets". Jed Christiansen did his always stellar job explaining the operation and value of prediction markets.  I had the opportunity to broaden the discussion, talking about "Collective Intelligence at Work: Promises, Perils and Practice".

My slides are now posted along with appreciation to all the very smart people-- acknowledged below-- who gave time to providing cases, insights and idea filtering to inform my talk.

Collective Intelligence At Work

Next Practice

Qualcomm's Ricardo Dos Santos and Motorola's  Rami Levy are responsible for the two most evolved applications of "Collective Intelligence at Work" that I know:

i. Qualcomm's VentureFest where collective intelligence meets corporate entrepreneurship and

ii. Motorola's ThinkTank Idea Exchange (TIX), a model of "socialized innovation"

and generously shared their slides allowing others to learn from their initiatives.

Both demonstrate the investment involved in putting collective intelligence to work that begins with clear focus on business strategy and how value will be created through crowdsourcing. It proceeds to developing the organizational systems and collaboration platforms required to filter the most promising collected ideas into profitable business opportunities.

Qualcomm's Venturefest and Motorola's ThinkTank Exchange also highlight the exceptional "Whole Mind" management talent required to lead collective intelligence initiatives. Both Ricardo dos Santos and Rami Levy succeed because they have respect and support from executive leadership and can also build the relationships across their organizations to engage key stakeholders and contributions from diverse minds.

Promise and Perils

My talk also included examples of crowdsourcing efforts that help us appreciate the discipline and evolved nature of the Qualcomm and Motorola collective intelligence initiatives.

Wikipedia participation dynamics, the gap between the number of people who read and actively contribute and their organizational challenges, have been well documented and discussed.

Tom Malone, director of MIT's Center for Collective Intelligence, a "We are Smarter than Me" project sponsor, openly admits that the project needed more active facilitation. Ultimately a team of paid writers were hired to filter the crowdsourced contribution and produce the book.

Andrew McAfee's Cases 2.0 wiki was inspiration for Wikisourcing Sustainable Enterprises (WSE) (convened with colleague Victoria Axelrod) to collect examples of enterprises leading the way with sustainability projects to provide models for others. Paying closer attention to the number of Cases 2.0 collected emergently over two years would have made me wiser about the work involved to make WSE successful. I'm appreciating the organization the Social Media Advertising Consortium has assembled to collectively support the development of a common social media vocabulary and evolve their industry.

Your taking time to review my slides, comment and challenge my thinking is appreciated.

Do you agree putting collective intelligence to work is critical to 21st century business success?

Please share your successful collective intelligence projects and recommended practices.  And if perchance your initiatives did not meet expectations do take a moment to reflect so others benefit from your experience.

~ Jenny Ambrozek

CREDITS

In addition to Ricardo Dos Santos and Rami Levy who shared their cases my thanks to:

• Linda Rebrovick, CEO Consensus Point for permission to use her Web 2.0 Trends slide
• Ana María Llopis, founder of ideas4all;  David Resseguie, Sensorpedia, Oak Ridge National Laboratories, and Michael Turillo, COO of Spencer Trask Collaborative Innovations, (an industry leader through their investments in InnoCentive and Inno360) for product and trend insights
• Gary Colet and Phil Ridout (Knowledge Innovation Network), Victoria Axelrod, Bill Anderson, Steve Ardire, Dan Keldsen, John Maloney, Wendy Gold and Cathy Joseph for fresh perspectives 
• Wikisourcing Sustainable Enterprises contributors and Vincent Associates for providing network maps.

RELATED RESOURCES

• KIN December 2 Resources Google Wave
  
• Ambrozek, Jenny, and Axelrod, Victoria "Broadcasting Innovation:Organising to Collect Intelligence," Inside Knowledge Dec. 2007
• Axelrod, Victoria and Ambrozek, Jenny "Prediction Markets Co-creating an Organisation's Future." Inside Knowledge Mar. 2008

Have Prediction Markets arrived as an Enterprise Knowledge Sharing & Innovation Platform?

A small and really smart group of people convened by John Maloney (at the Gleacher Executive Center in Chicago), on November 6 to explore the latest developments in collective intelligence and use of prediction markets.

The conversation flow, diversity, and challenge to conventional thinking mirrored the forward looking sculptures in nearby Millenium Park.  

For those new to prediction markets finding a public prediction market to explore is increasingly easy, for example see the Industry Standard and CFO Magazine. The 2.0 Adoption Prediction Market made news at the recent San Francisco Enterprise 2.0 Conference. 

Andrew McAfee lists prediction markets as part of Enterprise 2.0. This Inside Knowledge Prediction Markets Masterclass (co-authored with colleague Victoria Axelrod) describes the prediction market landscape in 2008.

Why did I leave Chicago thinking that enterprise use of prediction markets to tap grassroots employee knowledge for forecasting, and in support of innovation. is about to blossom?

Three reasons:

1. High Profile Proven Enterprise Prediction Market Applications

Exemplifying the time for new ideas and technology to find their way into widespread adoption first use of an enterprise prediction market is credited to Robin Hanson (George Mason University professor and Consensus Point prediction market platform provider Chief Scientist) and dates to 1990. 

HP pioneered  use of prediction markets with it's BRAIN project. (Dr. Leslie Fine, now Crowdcast's VP Market Design, was HP's BRAIN lead researcher.)  The wider adoption of prediction markets by companies from Google to Best Buy, Cisco Systems, GE Healthcare, General Mills, Qualcomm and ArcelorMittal, is widely reported including in this New York Times articles.

Friday Rami Levy, added to the list in explaining Motorola's evolved use of a prediction market to filter ideas and speed innovation.

2. Technology Evolution

As a pioneering prediction market provider since 1994, Chicago Cluster sponsor Consensus Point hosts high profile clients Best Buy, Motorola and Qualcomm among others. The Chicago meeting also revealed a next generation of vendors including Crowdcast and Spigit. Crowdcast's focus is forecasting business results. Spigit gets attention  because of Warburg Pincus's recent $10m investment. Their platform targets "innovation management" and embeds prediction in a social networking platform.

Each provider is carving out a niche and extending enterprise prediction market applications.  In the process platforms are evolving, made easier to use and integrate into day-to-day business processes.

3.  Growing Enterprise Understanding

The case has been made for the business value that comes from reaching out and engaging more diverse minds to solve business problems and co-create new opportunities. A host of books from James Surowiecki's Wisdom of the Crowds (2004) to Yochai Benkler's Wealth of Networks (2006), Dan Tapscott's Wikinomics  (2006) and Clara Shih's Facebook Era (2009) detail the trend. 

While enterprise prediction markets have been the province of innovative companies, the Chicago participants pointed to a diverse and expanding array of new applications.  

The talent represented in each of the platform vendor executive teams, and among participants implementing new applications, was also thought provoking about factors in successful use. Putting prediction markets to work in enterprises demands a wide array of skills from technical understanding for making markets perform within the culture of an organization, to relationship building to engage participants and encourage contribution.  Quantitative skills + tie to business strategy + relationship building + technology are all essential.

What have I missed? If you were in the room in Chicago, or not, please comment to inform my reflection on the discussions.

 ~ Jenny Ambrozek