The other day I was listening to James Surowiecki on an SXSW podcast talking about his book Wisdom of Crowds. I’d heard another of his talks about a year ago, but almost crashed the car this time around as I frantically tried to make notes (mental note to self…audio annotation on an ipod would be a good idea – writing and driving isn’t).
At the book’s core, is a fantastic set of stories that provide compelling evidence of the benefits of capturing ideas from across groups of people (ideas markets, experts vs. the masses etc.)
This NY Times story (via good ol’ memeorandum) is another example of a company that has successfully deployed an ‘ideas market’ – enabling employees to post ideas, and buy and sell those ideas on an exchange in order to let the strongest win – kind of a Darwinian R&D…
There’s another key lesson here – “…”We’re the founders, but we’re far from the smartest people here,” Mr. Lavoie, the chief executive, said during an interview at Rite-Solutions’ headquarters outside Newport, R.I. “At most companies, especially technology companies, the most brilliant insights tend to come from people other than senior management…”
As anyone who’s spoken to me in the last few months will testify, I’ve become boringly repetitious on my ideas around ‘learning lists’ – rapid-captures of ideas and expertise for employees in list format…
The problem with voting on ideas, is that people tend to reinforce existing ‘good ideas’ – the whole wisdom of crowds idea is that new ideas are forthcoming if there’s no precedent (although this does need finite, measurable criteria, like defining a location, or other quantifiable value)
However, assigning a value to ideas and ‘trading’ them in a marketplace idea is an excellent one…as it embraces reinforcement of existing ideas…and enables a measurable comparison (perceived market value) to be allocated to wholly disparate ideas…
The main lesson from all of these ideas an examples, is that there are _credible_ examples of organisations and groups (e.g. proctor and gamble) who are seeing real business benefit from creating a platform for sharing ideas from, for and between their people…
And so, since listening to James Surowieck and building the learning lists idea (and engine!) I’ve thought a lot about how a list engine can provide a lot of this idea sharing functionality for companies, and make it bone-head simple to capture, tag, share and popularise ideas across a group of people…
Stay tuned :-)
UPDATE: _Excellent_ discussion on the article on Slashdot. Multiple examples etc. listed:
* Prediction Markets -Wikipedia (bloody excellent info)
* Ideosphere – ‘financial’ market for ideas