Coolhunting, Chapter 3: Swarms Can Better Predict the Future

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Wie entwickeln sich die Aktienkurse? Welcher Film gewinnt einen Oscar? April Is collaboration the future of invention? Collaborative Innovation Networks COINs are online communities of like-minded people working together to create innovations. Author and scientist Peter Gloor originated the term. Ihr Entwickler, Peter A. Gloor, zeigt, wie man damit Innovationen jagt.

February 7th, Web tool predicts election results and stock prices Tools such as Google Trends and Blogpulse track what people are talking or thinking about by recording the frequency with which words are entered into search engines and appear on blog sites. Now Peter Gloor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is going a step further, and using the web to make specific predictions.

COINs allow for building organizations that are more creative, productive, and efficient by applying principles of creative collaboration, knowledge sharing, and social networking. The goal of this project is to combine prediction markets with swarm prediction through Web mining.

Does the swarm i. The goal of this project is to analyze and come up with interventions for optimizing individual and organizational creativity through microscopic social network analysis using sociometers. The goal of the project is to measure human emotions through the sensors of a smartwatch. It consists of an interactive animation that allows visitors to visually track the changes in Wikipedia articles over a given time period. Condor computes and visualizes the structure of social communication networks by automatically generating interactive movies of communication flows.

Examples of Condor applications can be seen here. Updated listing at www. Dynamic Maps of Knowledge. Finding Patients Like Myself on Facebook. Understanding the effect of social networks on user behaviors in community-driven knowledge services. Verborgenes sicht- und nutzbar machen , Alpha , April Nemoto, K. Teaching a Global Project Course: CCI Working Paper Motivation and Embeddedness of Wikipedia Editors. Tell your customers what they really want to hear!

Analyzing the Flow of Knowledge with Social Badges. Comparing the structure of virtual entrepreneur networks with business effectiveness. You Are Who Remembers You. Detecting Leadership Through Accuracy of Recall. August 11, Waber, B. Aral, S, Lazer, D. Nann, S, Fischbach, K. Luebeck, Springer Lecture Notes in Informatics. Proc 5th EduMedia Conference: Digital Creativity and Innovation in the Web 2. Wearable Sensors for Pervasive Healthcare Management. Springer Lecture Notes in Informatics, No. Coolhunting for Trends on the Web.

April Gloor, P. Coolhunting on the Web and in the Blogosphere. Sunbelt , Corfu, Greece, May New research and patents and things like that came about as a result of the collaboration engendered by this network. Some developments in spine surgery might not have happened without this site. This collaboration has been enabled in large part by the technology that broke down distance and time barriers. Spine surgeons in different parts of the world are discovering connections they might not have otherwise known about.

Bees in Minnesota dancing and being seen in New Delhi. A global waggle dance. Wednesday, April 25, Coolhunt 7 - Tuesday, April 24, I find the article really inspiring. IMAGINE a newspaper with more than 2, writers, researchers and copy editors, yet no supervisors or managers to speak of. No deadlines; no meetings to plan coverage; no decisions handed down through a chain of command; no getting up on a desk to lead a toast after a job well done. Further down in the article, there is a quote: In theory, it can never work.

The Wikipedia article was originally entitled "Virginia Tech Shooting," then there was a discussion to rename it "Virginia Tech Massacre. You can see the user Vranak defending his position of including the word "massacre" in the title. Wikipedia has total transparency in their operations. Isn't this what drives people crazy about Wikipedia? The idea that so many people have so much time to debate such a minor point as changing the name of the entry from "Virginia Tech Shooting" to "Virginia Tech Massacre"? Well, I don't think it's a minor point. I think it's all about coolhunting, actually.

The people involved in grooming this entry thought it was important. Right now it's cool to participate in Wikipedia. When the speaker, Kevin Crowston, was talking I was thinking, "How long will it be cool to be a Wikipedian? In , there were around 2, people. Today, it's growing at such an exponential rate that, theoretically, it will take less than 10 years for everyone in the world to be a Wikipedian. How long do you think it will take before everyone has an entry on Wikipedia? We discussed that, too. Right now, there is a requirement for an entry to be something newsworthy.

Combine Facebook, MySpace, and Wikipedia, and you get a worldwide universe of virtually everyone online. As an aside, there is no entry at Wikipedia for "Peter Gloor. There's also a page called coolhunting, though it's not about our book. As far as everyone in the world becoming active Wikipedians, I think that will not happen.

Blog Archive

At some point in time, nearly everything stops being "cool" because everyone is doing it. Usually, when I give talks about the concept of "cool" and coolhunting, I ask people what's cooler: Most people say the iPod is cooler. When I asked this last time in Helsinki, one of the most trendsetting cities, someone said it's so much cooler to have an mp3 player from Singapore because everyone has the iPod: You're using "cool" now in the sense we tend to think the word means, which is not necessarily what Coolhunting is about.

I think they go together. In our book, we make some distinctions between "cool" just being something that sells really well and something that touches an emotional nerve. In particular, we think that "cool" things also have some aspects of the greater good. That is actually the definition that applies to Wikipedia and speaks directly to Peter's point. It is unlikely that Wikipedia will still be "cool" at some point in the future.

What I think we would predict is that something even better will become the next cool thing -- perhaps something with the best elements of Wikipedia that will become even more pronounced in a new online community, or maybe something we can't even yet imagine. We can speculate what it might be, for example YouTube combined with Wikipedia, a combination of articles with videos.

There are already hybrid forms of the underlying ideas behind Wikipedia.

For instance, here in Boston, a new newspaper called BostonNOW was launched just within the last few days. It's a free newspaper, distributed at public transit stops. It's competing with a free newspaper called Metro which is part of a worldwide chain. BostonNOW's objective is to become a "blog newspaper. It has already begun to try to draw people into the creation of a newspaper by having a daily online editorial meeting. It's a videoconference and anyone can join and speak and help plan the next day's edition of the paper. Within a short time span, the readers will write the newspaper everyday.

I think the bigger question is, "How are those articles being produced? Instead, the articles are derived from other accessible news sources.

What often makes "original news" is the perspective, or the commentary. You can say an article is original by the comments that string along behind it. Many of those comments are, in fact, "original news" reports.

I think that's a delicate discussion. I don't think it's a good idea to have fully individualized newspapers. To some degree, what we can expect for the future is a combination of all of these things we've talked about: I think in this context, I beg to differ. A newspaper like Metro is the antithesis of personalized news, whereas something like BostonNOW is tremendously personalized. The objective is to actually open the decision-making process regarding what's going to be in the newspaper to the readers themselves.

It's not going to be perfect. There is a section in Coolhunting that covers the "madness of crowds. For example, on the day of Anna Nicole's death, her Wikipedia entry was frozen due to so many user updates. There have been experiments on Wikipedia where people tried to see how stable it is. It has proven to be amazingly stable. A professor whose name I can't recall entered inaccurate information on approximately 20 Wikipedia entries. He wanted to see how long it would take Wikipedia to fix the errors. Within 30 minutes, all 20 of the entries were corrected -- even ones in the most obscure entries.

Once they discovered his first error, they searched using his username to find the others and correct them all. History is full of examples of crowds going off the track, and we discuss this in our book. Entire countries have totally gone off the track. There was recently a really interesting experiment. Newspaper ads invited people to come to an exhibition hall.

There were then some experiments as far as crowd behavior goes. Out of the , the researchers secretly told only 10 to reverse the direction they were walking. If a large enough arc of the population deviates from the right direction, then the others will follow. Wikipedia has taken measures to protect the open editing of entries, such as entries dealing with religion and politics, that are enormously controversial, watched very closely, and debated very hotly. Does that kind of sabotage and marketing that also goes on in Wikipedia damage its use as an indicator of the wisdom of crowds.

I think what that shows is, unfortunately, the same thing as the open environment of the early days of the Internet. There are always bad guys out there. And there are opinions that people believe in strongly. These are examples not of problems with the technology of collective intelligence or collaborative innovation, but problems with human beings and the discourse we have in our society.

It is somewhat related to the technology because the online world atomizes people in a certain way, being dissociated with genuine human contact. All that being said, Wikipedia is remarkably self-correcting. What about Gresham's Law: How can Wikipedia or any other user-generated forum prevent Gresham's Law from taking effect? That's a very tough question. Unfortunately, you need enforcement of the rules.

The good news is that we are observing that the more people involved, the less likely these sorts of things are to happen. Wikipedia is an example. The kinds of things you're talking about are the exception rather than the rule. Let's return to our discussion of citizen journalism, by looking at Assignment Zero. This website is the vision of Jay Rosen. It's similar to Wikipedia; however, it attempts to keep the level of professionalism much higher by producing high quality, original articles.

Assignment Zero requires original research, such as interviews. If you think you are a journalist of professional quality, you can sign up here and collaborate on a story. This is an example of how an organization creates trust. Users want to see the faces of the people behind the projects. If you scroll down on the About page, the last entry is "You. That's the crowd they have recruited so far. You can click on a user's profile, then select the "recent activities" tab, and see their contributions to the site. There's also a tab for a contributor's "reporting topics.

Journal of Visual Experiments. It's really high-end research, still mostly about the sciences, but it's in a totally new format. It's a new way of publishing research papers using video to supplement a text presentation. Videos can be uploaded here instead of, or in addition to, writing a journal article. This site gives users the ability to leave comments and to upload supplementary files. It makes information with other researchers around the world faster and easier.

It allows people with these similar, narrow interests to collaborate. Listeners, please post your comments to the Swarm Creativity Blog -- whether they're about commentary on the subject of today's coolhuntany or connection problems you experienced. Tuesday, April 24, Coolhunt 6: Monday, April 23, Let's start with a website that I go to everyday: O'Reilly Radar at Radar. I thought it would be interesting to discuss the software program Freebase.

The concept behind it is quite amazing, and what it means for bridging ideas for the future of the web. Because it's an alpha product, however, we can't actually look at it at this point. Hillis created Thinking Machines, which involved a massively parallel computer called the Connection Machine. He's the brain behind Freebase, a software program that is a product of MetaWeb. Hillis wants to centralize information into one database.

I don't think it will work. Things can have different meanings depending on how you look at them. The idea of centralization vs. Decentralization is important to swarm creativity. The creative process happens because we bring in so many different viewpoints. I agree with Peter. I thought it would be interesting to discuss how Freebase's process for pulling in information may actually have value for what Peter and I advocate.

Amalgamizing and getting something of use from collective intelligence has great benefits. The question is, "How do you do it? I think it's great to look back at Hillis' first successful company, Thinking Machine. He had a massively parallel computer located in Massachusetts that was supposed to solve the problems of the world. It used centralized computing. All the attempts at solving really hard problems, such as searching for extra-terrestrial life, are done using peer-to-peer computing.

It's done much better that way than with the centralized computer. I'll see if we can get access to show Freebase on the Coolhunt. Until then, let's start today's hunt at Mashable. This is one of my favorite blogs. It's different than a lot of other social networking blogs. Everything about the really big sites is tracked and discussed here. One of the nice things this site does is it tracks social networking sites -- such as MySpace -- and what people are doing as they create them, broadly defined.

Mashable often publicizes new sites and talks about them. The other thing I really like about Mashable is the Headlines in the box at the top of the page. There's hardly ever a 2-day period that can go by without something compelling happening. This is a posting from last Friday. It's one of the most significant pieces of web-related news to come out in several years. It's based on an article from The Economist finding that social networking sites are about to overtake sex sites in volume of browser traffic in the U. I think, Scott, you are overly optimistic.

In our book, Coolhunting, we have a foreword by a very well known blogger by the name of Danah Boyd. She traces some of the initial history of MySpace and Facebook, and she makes the point that when they were first launched, they became a place for people to make "hookups. If people are going to MySpace or Facebook to find someone to have a sexual liaison with instead of going to something like "hotbabesinyourneighborhood. I just think this shows that the overall population of web users is still growing. In the past, the people desperate for sex were using hotbabesinyourneighborhood.

In the past, people would go to the trendy bars in the neighborhood and now they go to social networking sites to hook up. I think it's a more natural use of our strongest desires: We have homophilic tendencies, which means we look for people who share similar interests and we form communities based on that. The web is being put to use by helping us become more connected, and it's becoming more mainstream. Do you know anything about Pete Cashmore, who wrote this article and put this site together? He is one of the main people behind Mashable. I think he's one of the most famous bloggers on social networking issues.

His writing is usually extremely thoughtful and knowledgeable. Let's go back to the home page of Mashable and take a look at the article on the failure of many web startups, which is also a Pete Cashmore post: I thought we should talk a little bit about why this happens. I think it relates to a part in Coolhunting wherein we talk about some web startups and their tremendous demise.

This will give us an opportunity to talk about some of the principles of coolhunting and also of swarm creativity that have an effect on whether you're going to succeed or not. I think we should look at it from the perspective of the crowd. None of these imitation social networking start-ups is really about a leader; they're all followers. They're not setting up a new direction -- it's all about copying others. It does not bode very well for those startups. My advice for anyone who is doing coolhunting for really cool stuff, this might be a very good test.

If it falls into these 10 categories that Cashmore writes about, chances are it won't succeed. The inventor of an item is often not the one to popularize it. Some of these "wannabes" are often the refined version that works. For instance, Friendster versus MySpace, which is covered in your book Coolhunting. Yes, Danah Boyd covers that in her foreword. She discusses how one site, MySpace, gives users the power to do what they want and to solve problems and create the site in the image they want. And the other, Friendster, tries to control them more.

It's a very important point. Often, any one of these sites could perhaps be tremendously successful -- even if all 10 of Cashmore's statements apply, if there are users who stumble upon it and see some value and take hold of it and move it somewhere other than where the original person had even conceived.

Now, let's continue the Coolhunt at Yub. My year-old daughter uses this site. She told me it was cool because it's like a virtual mall. She didn't mean in the sense of virtual shopping, but a social network like the one suburban teens create in malls. This is reflected right at the very top where it says, "Meet. In this respect, the developers have sought to find a way around the isolation of individuals that happens when they make online purchases.

Next, I'd like us to look at the concept of swarm finance. There is a website where you can borrow money from people you don't know. This is an amazing idea that seems to be working. We don't know yet if it works because it's very new. You have to be totally transparent about your financial circumstances.

In return, people will lend you money at a better rate than if you would just use a credit card. It's not about the rates, though; it's about the collateral. There is no collateral offered in exchange for loans on Prosper. People who are getting money from Prosper are people who might not be able to get it from traditional outlets because of lack of collateral. Let's look at a sample listing, the one with the headline, "Daugter needs to take summer college classes Max State Int.

This is an amazing page we are looking at here. It contains a vast amount of information about this person, her finances, and her project. On the home page, there are links to news stories about Prosper. There have been some investigative studies of it, too. The basic story is that there's no collateral for these loans, and there's a very, very low default rate.

But it's just been around for a year, so there really hasn't been time to default on it. Well, thus far, the concept appears to be working. I just want to use this as an example. I'm not necessarily giving it an endorsement. This is quite a bit more elaborate than some simple social networking pages that just have contact info.

This is a very detailed financial profile. But it is still social networking. Click on the "Groups" tab from the home page. This shows borrower and lender groups. You can create your own group or join an existing group. People with similar interests come together. For example, there is a group called "Apple User Group" with members for people who want to finance the purchase of a new Mac computer.

Each member can get a 5 percent discount. The group has negotiated a discount from Apple. This is social networking at a higher level than just making an over-the-web connection and having 30, friends on MySpace. This is also an example of microlending, which we will cover more in depth during a future Coolhunt. Joining us today we have a special guest, Renaud Richardet, developer of the Condor software project. He's also a colleague of Scott and Peter. The coolhunt consists of one site review, one blog post, one comment on another's post, and one personal connection via email or phone.

Please introduce yourself and tell us where you're calling from. I'm calling from the French-speaking part of Switzerland. I met Scott working on this project. I'm calling from my home office in MA. I'm going to let Renaud speak for himself but I'll introduce something that's essential to the Coolhunting book. We use a software called TeCFlow for graphs to show social networking at http: It's downloaded for free and shows the temporal communications connections among people. We'll begin our Coolhunt today at Galaxy Advisors, which is an association of a bunch of coolhunters -- a swarm of creative people.

The software shows a great many maps that look similar to the zodiac or constellations. Those with us today can follow along online. At galaxyadvisors, the first part of the process is entering data into the software in different formats such as HTML. So you're importing large quantities of info? When you think of 3 million emails, it's scary. So when we analyzed the emails from Enron, we only looked for the messages where people are talking about fraud.

This helps you to "find the needle in the haystack. In our book we actually report on the outcome of the research that Renaud just described. People are familiar with the Enron accusation and their claims against it. Analysis of these emails show a direct connection between the perpetrators of the fraud in California with Ken Lay by searching on words such as "affair," "investigation," and "disclosure. Were your results ever involved in the trial? No, or at least they were not mentioned in open court or entered into transcripts.

But economists hired to get people out of trouble do use such software as Condor. Research of such documents does reveal the usefulness of Condor. Also, Condor can be used to enter web pages instead of just email for search purposes. You can graph the information as nodes web pages and lines hyperlinks. We focus primarily on links between web pages and email instead of focusing on text as with Google.

Text is more used for web page searches. For example, with blogs we look for who started the buzz, the subject -- regardless of what subject it is. This not only spots the trends but the trendsetters. We have a server version to help users explore coolhunting. On the first page of the Condor viewer we have probable searches.

Click on Show Me to see three graphs. The first graph you see is what we call the galaxy. We have pre-searched all the important information. The graph is balanced with a layout algorithm. You can see the largest nodes are the search engines, Wikipedia, along with other pages such as HillaryClinton.

Peter Gloor | MIT Center for Collective Intelligence

It's counting a subset of the net. Instead of Google's search for text, we focus more on the social network, for instance, who links to Hillary Clinton? Why would some of these sites come up? Because of the connection with Amazon. Let's take a look at IMDB.

PETER GLOOR

Open a new window to go to IMDB. Now type in Hillary Clinton. We're trying to bring users the most interesting information. It seems that very high traffic sites often show up, correct? Yes, because many people link to IMDB. Google shows that the more links to a page, the more important the page. The more a page is linked between other pages, the higher the "betweeness.

When pages are needed to connect other pages, they are "in between" those other pages. And the more betweeness, the more pertinent the pages. Does the relative size of the nodes on the graph relate to betweeness? The size of dots shows betweeness, how central the page is in the web, in the network. We are working on software that will remove certain sites from the list we track -- such as search engines -- that are distorting the linkage analysis. Renaud, could you speak of how coolhunters could use this in a more sophisticated hunt such as when others communicated, how they communicated, and about what they communicated?

In Finland, we just finished a project where we did just that. We were able to create another view of an organization's clustering, representing someone's position in the circle, so top management could see who is networking, who is talking to one another. And this has all sorts of implications for companies such as if people function as stars or galaxies. In the book "Coolhunting," we discuss an experiment with a cell phone company that wanted to determine what features or technology of a phone were the most important to users, which bells or whistles were embraced by the community.

It was a relatively small group of about 17 phones being giving out to people with some broad social class network. These college kids were given free phones with the understanding that the telecom company could track their use. It wasn't the content of their conversations that was tracked but rather which services they used and how long they used the services such as call waiting, soccer scores, etc.

Therefore, the company could better market their phones to the right customer community. Is the software free? Yes, you can download a trial version at the TeCFlow website. We plan to improve the relevance of the data returned. You'll be able to search for which blogs talk about your topics of interest, and blogs that are in between other blogs. Since we have a few more minutes, I'd like Renaud to talk about the website Digg. This is the prototype of a new kind of site where people can spread the word about cool sites they find.

You can see a list of popular sites on the left side. When a page has enough diggs it's promoted to the front page. We don't have CNN or Google telling us what's cool; it's actually the web and it's people telling you what's cool.

If you comment on a blog, you only reach the people who read that blog. But if you "digg" the blog -- that is, alert people on Digg to the blog by tagging it or "digging it," others might find it. Digg being part of this Web 2. I thought the Galaxy site was cool, but how do you digg it? Go to the top right to Submit a New Story link. The site is so popular that you have to register to create an account. It's a fairly simply process. I'm going to fill in the fields to see if I can digg. I've registered so now I could probably add a story -- which is how you "digg" a site -- by "adding a story.

I'm actually adding a story right now. I'm back at the home page where the number of diggs on the top story has doubled in the last 5 minutes, while email postings tripled. I would like to show you how this page is going to be digged. Search for "online coolhunting. These diggs represent selfless behavior to provide information. I'm going to sum up the coolhunt.

Thank you very much, Renaud and Scott. Join us Monday for the next installment of our live, online coolhunt with Peter Gloor and Scott Cooper. Friday, April 20, Coolhunt 4: Thursday, April 19, I thought we would start today at the Creative Commons website. It's not a blog, but it is a starting point for what we talked about yesterday.

We wound up at a website called freebeer. It's not just a copycat of Budweiser. For instance with Mozilla's Firefox, where anyone has access to the source code and can essentially innovate on top of that. And develop a better recipe. Or a different recipe. The idea is that everything is shared and credit is given where credit is due.

But the motivation is to build the best mousetrap, not necessarily to make money. So the beer is really analogous to that and we looked at all sorts of beer. On the Free Beer website, there's a link to Creative Commons. Creative Commons is a very interesting concept. This is essentially the legal website for the notion of just what it says on the top: This is speculative on my part, but I believe one of the objectives is to legitimize this kind of sharing within the framework of the proprietary world. In other words, to make it easier to relax the rights on certain works and to encourage the kind of works you're talking about.

And to destroy that regime from within.

This is what the Worker's Movement used to talk about in the s. The reality is that if you're going to do something in an open source way, you don't really need this kind of legal documentation. You just have to trust that the people who are going to use it are going to use it in the ways you stipulate. I do have some questions about Creative Commons. Is this a place where I bring content and choose from a menu of rights alternatives and more or less stamp my content with that?

What you can do is go to this website and apply for a Creative Commons license to a work. So people register their mostly online and some offline work here. Then you can come and ask to license the online work or whatever work it is. And essentially, you get a Creative Commons license, which is based on copyright, but the difference is the Creative Commons copyright allows you to do all types of things that typical copyrights don't allow you to do.

It allows you to treat the work as if it were not copyrighted. Are there any big corporations who have decided to rescind their rights on information and to allow it to be copyright-free through Creative Commons? It's mostly smaller enterprises, but there are examples of companies doing similar things. For instance, not too long ago IBM released a whole slew of its software, relinquished patents in , and proposed a patent commons for royalty-free, open source software development.

What IBM did was give it away, seeding the initiative. They identified U. We want to establish this platform for people to do what they want with these patents we've developed. While that's probably true, I don't think it minimizes the significance. It was fair to say it was a cautious first step, but definitely more than some companies have been known to do: When forced to reveal source code, some companies basically put junk out there that makes it very difficult to use the code.

Right, that's a good point.

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I think what IBM is doing is certainly in the spirit that's becoming part of the innovation world. Part of unleashing the power of collaboration by putting out there the problems that they're trying to solve and sharing with the swarm everything that they have thus far in their attempts to solve the problem and have whomever happens upon it try to help, where companies actually post problems and offer tens of thousands of dollars to those who can help fix the problem.

It has a lovely little atomic logo. This was started by a pharmaceutical company, Eli Lilley. It's now in lots and lots of industries. You can see right there on the front page how it works. A company posts a challenge. Such as this one, searching for a synthetic root in organic chemistry. People are offering financial incentives to solve problems. What this is illustrating is sort of the breakup. These are all part of a piece even though Creative Commons is not exactly the same.

They're all showing breaking up the monolithic black box problem solving or innovation. There are a lot of famous examples of people from the most unexpected places winning the prize. A guy teaching at a third-rate university in Kazakhstan solved a chemistry problem. The Wall Street Journal had an article about a million-dollar prize and a Russian youth solving an "unsolvable" math problem. He declined the prize! What I think came out of your book for me is that companies benefit and society benefits when people stop holding their knowledge so closely and instead toss it to the wind and see what happens.

Is that a fair summary? Yes, that really is what Peter and I think and we've taken this idea further. We've got an article in the current issue of Sloan Management Review called "The New Principles of the Swarm Business" where we've taken some of our ideas in Coolhunting and gone even further and tried to apply the principles of coolhunting and cool farming to how a business in the future might best succeed.

The three principles are: The idea is that you should innovate and share, and you probably will end up making a lot of money. What you're providing is evidence. The development of the World Wide Web is a good example. It happened in all the ways of coolhunting, one of which was the people who propelled it forward did so with the motivating factor of wanting to see the idea to its fruition. They're all worth a lot of money now. Is it possible to drill through this site to see how this meeting of problems and solutions happen? There's a section for seekers who have problems and solvers who have solutions.

Which side would you like to drop in on? It tells you what Innocentive can do for you. If you want to see what the actual challenges are, you go to Innocentive Challenges on the menu. This is also a networking site as well. I think it might be interesting to continue with this thread and go to a site called Rite Solutions. This company has a kind of innocentive internally. We're seeing this more and more as well. It's an internal idea and prediction market that they call "Mutual Fun. One is for emerging technologies; it's called the SpazDaq.

Technologies outside the company might acquire. Savings Bonds are ideas for saving money or making the company more efficient internally. Anyone who works at Rite Solutions can come up with stock. The basis is their collective intelligence about whether or not they think the ideas are good. What Rite Solutions has done is throw out the ideas to everyone and see what people think about it, but they're not necessarily shopping for the solution but shopping for the collective intelligence of their employees to see if it makes sense to invest real money.

What do people think about the ideas? They create an "expectus" instead of a prospectus. There's a ticker that scrolls across all the computer screens in the company in real time. They gauge the direction of the senior managers from gathering this collective intelligence. Why do you think that the addition of an exchange or more or less a gambling-style interface would encourage this sharing of knowledge in a way that not having that structure doesn't? I think part of it is that it's fun to do it this way. If Peter were on the call, he'd use his standard phrase, "It always makes a difference if you have skin in the game.

What we don't know about specifically is the degree to which if the prediction works correctly and they end up making a business decision that turns out to be tremendously profitable how the originator of the idea benefits, but I have no doubt that they do -- financially. Is there a certain threshold number of people who have to play in order to get the results that are statistically relevant as opposed to just a couple of employees?

I think Rite Solutions has a lot more employees. I think there's a high level of participation. I don't have a specific number, but definitely the more the merrier -- especially when the swarm comprises knowledgeable, smart people who are innovators and have specific knowledge.

It looks like they have created a variety of games that they market to companies who want to pull out the marketing consciousness of their employees.

These are not just for their own employees. They create collaborative games that their customers use. This is very interesting. There's been quite a bit of research in gaming and how game theory plays in terms of business development. It's sounding like what Coolhunting is telling us is that when you play the game by giving away and spreading it around, those are the people who win the game. That's a very good point. If people want to read more about mutual fun, they can go to businessinnovationfactory. There's a search function. One of the articles is called "Stories of Innovation" and it's about Lavoie creatively inspiring employees as a source of innovation.

I have a side segue here, about something in the news today. Isn't that the same issue your article is published in? Four marketing experts at MIT's Sloan School of Management found that companies often didn't understand how consumers were using their products. When they actually looked at how, they found out different information than what they originally thought -- basically, finding the right job for your product. This strikes me as dovetailing very nicely with what you've been talking about in that they quote Peter Drucker: I think more businesses are figuring this out.

Peter and I have written about some interesting ideas. I recently did some research for some MIT researchers. Design-inspired innovation in which he discusses a very interesting example of this, Lego.

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