Overview: Market4thought Hits The Mark

Though analytical tools have come far in predicting events such as equipment failure and design performance, many important domains are still too complex for such methods. Critical areas such as strategic planning and product innovation involve too many unknowns, including the human element, to predict with even modest accuracy. Market4thought brings the wisdom of your key people, from the shop floor to the executive suite (and even the board room and customer base if you wish), to the task of predicting and improving the success rate of your critical goals and projects.

A Decision Tool For Business

Market4thought is an online prediction market: a virtual stock market where people buy and sell shares of predictions about the future. Market4thought is the prediction market for business; it is designed to increase the ROI of projects, goals, and innovations. It does this in two ways: 1) it provides better predictions about a project's chances of success, and 2) it allows an organization to focus its top people on making those projects a success.

Prediction Markets

As mentioned, Market4thought is a kind of prediction market. These prediction markets have been around for years, but only recently have they been applied to a wider range of real applications. On the web, you can find prediction markets for politics, the economy, and even upcoming Hollywood movies.

Exercise Your Corporate Wisdom

Unlike polls or surveys, which provide an average of opinion, prediction markets represent something closer to a consensus opinion among those trading in the market. As such, their predictions represent the collective "wisdom of the crowd", to paraphrase James Surowiecki the author of "The Wisdom of Crowds". This better estimate of the prediction is due to two reasons. First, unlike polls, people will generally only participate, by buying or selling stocks, if they know something about that particular prediction. Second, prediction markets, and especially Market4thought, encourages investors to share thoughts and information about the predictions, giving everyone much greater knowledge about the predictions.