I had the pleasure of spending some time last week with Tom Malone, the Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan school of Management, and director of the newly created MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. (Disclaimer- my employer is now a big ol' sponsor of CCI) The conversations with Tom helped catalyze some prior thoughts I had pursued on prediction markets and explicit information economies.
What I hadn't done was connect all the dots and see if there were net benefits to prediction markets, information economies, and virtual worlds. Let me see if I can walk through this one (more for my own edification than for any educational ambitions) without running into a mental wall......
Prediction markets, oversimplified, allow you to tap into collective intelligence (most recently featured in 'The Wisdom of Crowds') by creating composite fitness metrics of any particular item. In the case of enterprises, you could (as Alph Bingham did at Eli Lilly) have each team member of a large development team vote on how they feel the project is progressing (1-10 scale), entirely subjectively from their point of view. If you were to take the aggregate of those numbers for all members of a project, you'd have a composite number that reflected all the different perspectives. You could do this across projects and track them on a weekly or monthly basis, and it would start to look like section 2 of the Wall Street Journal. The cynic in me says that you'd eventually develop an internal SEC to make sure that managers didn't 'game' the fitness metrics to make their projects look better (collusion).
One seminal example of this that also happens to be practically in my own backyard is the Iowa Electronic Markets, which forecast political election outcomes frequently.
Information Economy. This is something touched on in Beck and Wade's Attention Economy, however you could begin to develop values for information and tasks within an organization like you would with experience points in a massively multiplayer online game. So, you wrote an excellent proposal boilerplate? You get 100 experience points! (That's the original 'XP' to us old skool gamers). Ok, now you have accumulated 20,000 XP, then what? Well, perhaps you get a bonus, or a raise, or a promotion, or a bigger monitor, or you can use them (as Seriosity does) to demand more attention for things you consider to be high value. Make the current implict economy of ideas somehow explicit and measurable. Rumor has it that Vykarian in Shanghai is doing this internally, and actually has employees walking around with badges that display their XP. I don't know why, but I really like an explicit meritocracy......it's a great leveler.
Leighton Read over at Alloy Ventures uses the example of sending your boss a message with $100 attached, because you think it is that important. If the boss sends back his comments with $1, you have a pretty clear message how much to pursue the program.
So, if you consider using networked virtual environments ('verses, for those playing the home game), all of your interactions are captured and mediated electronically. You could build in prediction markets as well as an explicit information economy into the workflow or gameplay of an environment. The tricky part would be to determine what the goals of the company were so you would have guidance how to design the economy of ideas to begin with. In this case economy architecture is politics (sorry McLuhan).
Speaking of, the next two weeks should have some good food for thought along these paths, with the MIT/IBM virtual worlds event later this week, and Ludium in Indiana with Prof. Edward Castronova (yes, that Castronova). So, apologies in advance for more disjointed blogposts as these memes mylenate.
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