How to use Inkling Prediction Markets for your business

Inkling Markets capture the collective intelligence of a diverse group of people to give you insight about what may happen in the future. Typically, a question is posed. For example, “Will the Dow Jones be bought out by News Corps?” The possible answers are represented as stocks. You can buy and sell shares in these stocks to express your opinion on what you think is going to happen. As a diverse group of people expresses their opinion of what they think will happen using this market mechanism (the wisdom of the crowd), an accurate prediction can be elicited.

How can these Inkling Markets be used to address your business problems? You can either build a marketplace inside your own organization, or create a new external communication channel for your customers. The market on itself can be used for different purposes:

• Forecasting performance indicators such as revenues, sales, and quality metrics;
• Fostering innovation by creating a marketplace of ideas;
• Improving competitive and industry analysis;
• Building new interaction channels with customers and business partners; and
• Decreasing risk in managing large product development efforts.

Some companies are already using the platform:

• O’Reilly Media for example, uses Inkling to predict future book sales;
• Erickson Retirement Communities uses Inkling to predict satisfaction levels at each of its properties, and completion dates of major projects;
• FinancialNext, a start-up, is using Inkling to forecast U.S. macro economic indicators;
• Los Alamos National Labs is using Inkling to predict acceptance of its research by other scientists.

Compared to Spigit (Spigit - tap into the wisdom of the crowd), I think Inkling offers more opportunities to large companies. Inkling Markets are a fun and innovative way of tapping into the wisdom of the crowd with respect to predicting future sales, economic trends, idea acceptance…actually, almost anything.