The goal of the Summit is to bring together leaders in the industry to discuss innovation and financial planning methods that are key to future business success. Presentations during the conference focus on new technologies and solutions, and how these developments are revolutionizing the modern business world.

For those of you following from home, Mat’s presentation, titled “The Game of Risk: Leveraging Collective Intelligence for Successful Product Introductions,” spoke to the challenges associated with planning and bringing a new product to market.

According to IDC, market leaders get 43% of their profits from new products. To ensure success, companies must have reliable insight into risks as well as opportunities. Mat discussed ways companies can leverage the wisdom of their employees to produce timely, unbiased, and accurate forecasts that inform key decisions around new product introduction.

If you are interested in more details around the conference (ongoing until tomorrow) – check out all the ways to follow the event here.

As I mentioned last time, our initial attempt at running the project revolved around a project plan and regularly scheduled meetings. The project plan was standard — milestones, subordinate tasks, dependencies. Task owners came up with costing estimates. Since we were an experienced team, we added fudge factors liberally. Once the plan was in place, the team leads — engineering, product management,qa — agreed to meet weekly to track progress.

The alpha release milestone was critical, but comfortably far away, so the first few meetings were genial. But a week before ship it became ugly. Turned out that the port from our development environment to test (which simulates production) was in trouble. This was one of those on-going tasks. Deal was that as new APIs came on-line, they’d be ported for testing. Somewhere along the way, this stopped.

How could this have happened? How could it have taken us until the last minute to find out?

After the dust settled, we saw that the task reached 85% completion weeks ago and stalled (the problem was a serious bug in some 3rd party code, which was waiting for a patch). The engineer who owned the task, and indeed others, knew that the alpha milestone was at risk, but lacked a good way to give their knowledge voice. Since everything else was tracking well, intentionally or not, the problem that derailed the project was swept under the rug.

On reflection, it wasn’t a problem of scoping, project sponsor buy-in, staffing, or implementation. Rather, it was a problem of communication. That was when we decided to drink the Kool-Aid.

In the first post in this series, I described our experience with using Crowdcast to gain insight into risks around the next important milestone — the beta release — in the new mech project. Recall that the system rewards people for revealing rare and relevant information early. Moreover, since bets are placed anonymously, participants’ incentives are uniform and aligned. As bets come in, the system aggregates them in real-time and generates alerts when new information reduces the likelihood of success.

The first screenshot is of a piece of the console, which shows crowdcast summaries. The second is a part of the detailed view, which shows the distribution of beliefs as well as how they are tracking relative to target.

My bet on the beta crowdcast caused an alert to fire. It was an early warning for Huned, which gave him time to understand the root cause of the problem and make adjustments to keep the project on track. Next time I’ll put all the pieces together and present a complete overview of the platform that the new mech of ours enables.

Next month, we will be leading a webinar series with Peer Insight around harnessing collective intelligence in the enterprise. Stay tuned for more info and updates on how to sign up here on the blog.

For more information on our partnership, click here.

The difference between Data and Insight was the topic of a 5 minute TED U talk by Monitor 360’s Doug Randall. He told the story of the US Government having access to reams of data, but relying on on the ground, crowd-sourced insights to combine with that data to make decisions related to military strategy. Algorithms can not replace the value of human instinct. The key to culling the insights is asking the right questions and tapping into the right “crowd”.

So nice to see the concepts that we’ve obsessed over and worked to champion make a showing at an amazing event like TED.

The new mech was designed by our very own Leslie Fine and two UC Berkeley PhDs and implemented using MATLAB.  When it came time to hook it into the Crowdcast platform, we decided to use the MATLAB runtime rather than port the algorithms over to Ruby.  Among other benefits, this path would make incorporating mech changes much more efficient.  On the flip side, project logistics became quite hairy.  In addition to our dev guys here in San Francisco, we’d need to cozy up to the folks at MathWorks (authors of MATLAB) in Massachusetts and get much more tightly coupled to our math guys in Berkeley and a telecommuting systems integration consultant.

We finally got it working, but only after a painful false start.  Initially we managed the project the way we’d done it at other companies — Gantt charts and meetings.  That failed miserably.  Milestones slipped left and right.  People were stressed and unhappy.  Then we started to manage the project using Crowdcast.  The change to overall performance was astounding.  Will have more to say about this later.  First, here’s where Crowdcast came in.

Rev two of the project entailed creating a series of crowdcasts around our milestones.  Crowdcasts are accurate, unbiased predictions that incorporate insights of a diverse group of people.  Crowdcasts aggregate two components: “bets” on the outcome and a comments that explain participants’ rationales.

One of the crowdcasts was around the beta release date of the new mech.  Huned created the crowdcast and invited everyone involved to participate.  He specified a target date, which is not made available to participants, so that he could monitor performance over time.  In particular, the system would alert him if thecrowdcast moved too far outside of his target.

About a month back when the project was in full swing I had a chat with our integration consultant.  He’d just started load testing the system, but it kept falling over due to bugs in the MATLAB runtime (in fairness to MathWorks, we were pushing the envelope on the capabilities of some of MATLAB’s features).  I believed that I had rare and relevant information to share — the beta release was at risk because of MATLAB bugs — so I rushed to my desk to place a bet.

At the time, the crowd — all participants who’d shared their insights on this crowdcast before me — believed that beta would happen on January 15 +/- 7 days.  Given my information, I thought it’d be at least a week later, so I selected a range of January 20-31 and bet $5000 of my virtual money.  I also left a comment explaining what my point of view.  Relative to crowd beliefs, I had about a 25% chance of being correct, so the system offered me a payoff of about $19,200.  If someone were to place the same bet just after me, the odds would now be higher, and so the payoff offered lower.  Neat thing about this is that the system rewards those who not only have accurate information, but are early to reveal it.

Behind the scenes, Crowdcast infers my perception of the probabilities of various outcomes by looking at my bet range, wager amount, and total portfolio value. It then updates the crowd curve using this information. All this heavy lifting enables us to do some really amazing things. For instance, we can “slice and dice” crowdcasts, to analyze sentiment by department or region. In the next post, I’ll talk about how these capabilities helped us identify potential problems and course-correct to navigate around them.

Two first impressions:

1. You know you’re at a women’s conference when the refreshments are smoothies and cucumber water.
2. There are an incredible number of amazing, confident and brilliant women in San Francisco.

To summarize for those who may have missed out, here are a few observations and highlights:

• My favorite talk was “The Art of Negotiation”, by Katherine Barr, a partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures. She focused on key negotiation tools originally created by the Harvard Negotiation Project, now taught in MBA programs all over the world. I was riveted. In my experience, women don’t always stand up for what they deserve or self promote in the same way men do (for more thoughts on this, check out Clay Shirky’s recent controversial blog post). Katherine’s enlightened approach was both sensitive to this and forceful. Interestingly, I noticed that in the negotiation exercises, women frequently converged on tit-for-tat strategies, perhaps more so than we would have seen in a male-dominated room. (Of course, this was not the strategy I employed when besting Brooke in 5/5 exercises – sorry Brooke, don’t mess with a game theorist!)
• Most women we spoke to who worked at startups were in the B2C space. One attendee hypothesized, and I agree, that this is because women are often the target audience of B2C products and services, and people founded or joined companies geared towards issues they feel strongly about and are engaged with in their daily lives. This is unfortunate though, as, “ninety per cent of the fastest-growing companies in the country sell to other businesses.” (Malcom Gladwell, Jan 18, 2010, New Yorker) I hope B2C doesn’t manifest as the women-led startup ghetto.
• While the business playing field seems to be evening out for men and women, the conference was a thought provoking experience in determining how this is playing out in the tech sector. There seemed to be a pervasive attitude in the room that we should ignore potential differences, and assume that in business men and women are the same. To me, this is a shame. I embrace the fact that men and women have different work, negotiation, social and management styles. There are advantages to each, and we should honor and leverage that to best advantage.

I loved learning from and networking with women tech community, and witnessing their broadening scope as professionals and innovators. A huge “thanks” to the women at Girls In Tech who are working hard to propel careers and raise awareness of women, not only as key contributors to this industry, but as leaders.

In response to these ideas, Enterprise 2.0 pioneer and MIT Principal Research Analyst, Andrew McAfee, took to his blog to highlight some parts that really stuck with him. Andy’s synthesized version of the article really spoke to us and the ideas that we find valuable at Crowdcast. Andy highlighted a couple of values that we think are essential to smart business: breaking down hierarchies to unclog communication and fostering collaboration through peer effects, which allow people to get recognized by their peers for what they do rather than by their organizational rank.

Companies are beginning to understand the importance of communication within the ranks of their organization, not only to improve workflow, but also to improve access to employee intelligence. From there, managers can start to really monitor the pulse of their company. Ultimately, harvesting wisdom and gleaning well rounded insight is a competitive advantage – a very timely and relevant conversation to have as companies look ahead into 2010.

Prediction markets ask participants to give: they have to place bets, share their knowledge. The key to user engagement is to make sure that users get just as much as they give. One of our clients, a large consumer products company, has struck this balance, achieving record levels of participation. Your first assumption might be, participants are actively betting so they can win prizes — but this is not the case. In a recent user survey, only 4% of respondents said they participated because of the opportunity to win prizes.

Instead, here is what these participants “get” out of being active in the prediction market:

Share valuable information with participants. 88% of survey respondents said that one of their favorite aspects of the market was learning about the innovation opportunities being explored by the client. 55% liked that it was an opportunity to learn about others’ points of view. One comment: “It is a good way to connect product development with the marketplace. I love it!”

Demonstrate to participants that their voice is being heard. The survey also found that sharing personal insights was a key motivator of participation for 40% of respondents. One comment stated: “With this tool, I feel like a part of the company as a whole, not just a member of my specific department. I hope this tool continues to be of value to the company in the future.”

Have fun. It’s no secret that games are a great way to engage people AND teach (it’s not all fun and games). That’s why casual games, such as Farmville, have taken off. And it’s why the military uses gaming to help prepare for combat. In addition to Crowdcast, our client also uses ideation software. However, the ideation software does not have nearly the same participation levels as Crowdcast. One reason for this is because Crowdcast provides a fun, competitive game experience, whereas the ideation software doesn’t. 42% of survey respondents liked being able to see how they performed relative to other employees. One participant’s comment: “I love having a friendly competition with my colleagues – we stop by each other’s desk all the time to compare how we’re doing!”

To find out more about how Crowdcast technology works, please contact us here: info@crowdcast.com.

Retailers could benefit significantly from better foresight into consumer behavior and change the ultimate outcome of their most critical days of the year. Most importantly, this kind of insight would help them make better decisions for their business in terms of product stock numbers, price points, sales, discount strategies and other crucial metrics. During the holidays, new products are debuted to the public- some are swept up and instantly sell-out while others are left by the wayside, leaving stores with overstock. If retailers were able to better predict the level of sales on these days, they would have a greater chance of stocking the right stores, with the right amount of the right products.

How could they increase intelligence regarding these issues? Simple. They can leverage collective intelligence from stores, employees and buyers to understand what items are likely to be hot. Using this aggregated intelligence can help make better decisions about what to stock in stores or promote online. Bringing Crowdcast technology takes some of the guess work out of predicting product sales numbers and overall sales potential.

Prediction Markets would provide enormous insight to retailers who are desperately trying to minimize risks, ascertain realistic product quantities and gain a more reliable projection of how businesses can get the most out of the year’s most critical shopping days.

When: December 8^th at 11am PT.

Where: Register Today on CFO.com. It’s free to sign up.

Does your company rely on new product introductions to drive growth? A single missed launch date for a new product can impact company valuation by 5%, costing millions of dollars in market cap. With increasing consumer and investor expectations around new products and the globalization of supply chains – the risks to your company have never been higher or harder to measure.

How many products has your company launched over the years? The information you need to make better decisions and to minimize risks exists in your company, if only you had an efficient way to tap into it. Prediction markets offer a new way to identify, measure and respond to risks. By aggregating insights from across your company to evaluate and quantify risks, you have the best chance to recognize issues early and take corrective action.

In this webcast you will learn about the key problems with new product introductions, the risks they introduce, and how to use prediction markets to quickly identify, measure and respond to risks that keep new products from launching on-time.

Register Today.