What happens when you analyze college football like the CIA?
What happens when you apply CIA-style analysis normally used to understand China or Russia to your favorite sports team?
Read post →Cultivate Labs Blog
From the team shipping AI forecasting and sensemaking systems used by government, defense, finance, and research teams.
The Unintended Consequences of Running Internal Forecasting Tournaments
Forecasting tournaments are compelling but you should be eyes wide open to some negative consequences if you run them inside your organization.
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Cultivate Labs Completes its SOC 2 Type 1 Audit
SOC 2 certification is widely recognized as a gold standard for data security and requires companies to establish and follow strict information security policies and procedures.
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Cultivate Forecasts Latest Updates: Infographics, discussion features, and performance feedback
The latest Cultivate Forecasts platform updates as of July 2, 2020.
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Cultivate Forecasts Latest Updates: Team requests, hot word alerts, reporting features, badges
The latest Cultivate Forecasts platform updates as of June 9, 2020.
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Expert Q&A: The U.S. Government’s Challenges for Ongoing Risk Communication About COVID-19
An interview with an expert in risk communication about the ongoing challenges of communicating about COVID-19
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Cultivate Forecasts now offers presentation mode to capture live forecasts at meetings
New presentation feature lets people forecast -- and see the results update in real-time.
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Cultivate Forecasts just got a lot more collaborative with team functionality
Forecasting in teams can lead to greater accuracy, and we've got the features to make it possible, like private team pages with discussion boards and team rankings.
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New Platform to Crowdsource Experts' Forecasts on COVID-19 Pandemic
Partnership by Cultivate Labs and Good Judgment Inc will aggregate forecasts from experts to better understand the implications of the COVID-19 crisis and share the results with decision makers.
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Prediction Markets give hope to reproducibility crisis in scientific experiments
I talk to Anna Dreber Almenberg, an economist at the Stockholm School of Economics about prediction markets she's running to try and address the reproducibility crisis in science.
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Schedule Chicken
Schedule chicken is when someone is personally behind on their work, but doesn't say anything because they think someone else will, and take the heat for it, thus protecting their own ass. This apparently goes on at Apple, and is completely absurd. There's another way.
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Announcing Flashcast
We're excited to announce the availability of a new product, Flashcast. Flashcast is an entirely new way to interact with your audience. Ask them to make predictions about a related topic and watch the results, live.
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Cultivate talks to The Wall Street Journal about internal crowdsourcing
Cultivate Labs and two of our clients, AstraZeneca and the Canadian Nuclear Labs, were featured earlier this week in The Wall Street Journal's, "Companies Turn to Internal Crowdsourcing to Pick Best New Ideas."
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We need to make it feel ok to be wrong sometimes
No one enjoys being wrong. It’s an unpleasant emotional experience for any of us. But that’s exactly the risk we’re suggesting people take when we ask them to make a forecast about the future.
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3 lessons in global innovation from a Fortune 100 that’s winning outside the U.S.
If you’re leading a large team that’s globally dispersed, you understand the challenge to create an innovative culture that can span physical boundaries. Here are 3 lessons from one Fortune 100 client running an innovation campaign across multiple countries that's exceeded expectations in countries including Japan.
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Don't Kick Em' When They're Down
As I was scrolling through news this morning, I noticed a headline: Energizer’s 18,000mAh phone-battery monster is an Indiegogo flop. Checking other headlines about this, the news and commentary were equally brutal.
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The Rise of Anonymous Tough Love (And Not a Moment Too Soon)
When we start projects with our clients, one of the first items we talk about is whether they want people to be anonymous in our prediction market or if they’ll use their real identities. The answer often reveals a lot, both about company culture and their personal fears of what will be made transparent. The spoiler alert is most don’t want anonymity.
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The Culture of Fear Problem
After working with dozens of companies who have culture initiatives, I’m convinced their multi-million dollar investments in consultants, employee time, internal marketing, and the like will only see a partial return because a blocker is in their way: their culture of fear.
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What are “flash crowds” and how do we recruit them?
Our bread and butter working with clients is organizing their employees to participate in crowdsourcing exercises. Recently we have been approached more to help get forecasts from external crowds, either to support research projects, or to better understand what outside experts or customers think.
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Canadian Nuclear Labs’ scientists crowdfund $1.4M in seed-stage ideas
The Canadian Nuclear Laboratories (CNL), the nation’s premier nuclear science and technology organization, just ran its inaugural “Seed Program” committing $1.4 Million for employees to propose – and (using company funds) directly invest in – new projects for the research pipeline.
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Before we talk, are YOU ready?
In the last month we’ve had two potential clients, after receiving proposals from us for projects, say they needed to step back and start the projects very differently than what we had originally discussed. They just weren't ready yet, they acknowledged...
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Appreciating a roof over my head all over again
I recently took a trip to the White Mountains in New Hampshire to hike the "Presidential Traverse" and was reminded how much we take for granted in our daily lives.
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Can you crowdfund your way to a better culture at your company?
We recently did a project with a private company doing quite well in the marketplace. Its products are widely used and its growth over the past few years has been spectacular. Financially, the company is on really solid footing. But culturally, there were storm clouds. Growth has meant employing a few hundred people to a few thousand in only a few years. The CEO recognized this and lamented at the company's loss of its original hacker/builder culture...
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Thoughts on Augur, the decentralized, blockchain prediction market
I've been watching for the last few years the announcement, long delay, then recent launch of Augur, the decentralized, blockchain-based prediction market. First off, despite it taking a long time to launch, Augur finally did, and kudos to them for doing so. Building a prediction market from scratch is not easy, building a prediction market on top of immature technology is harder, and building a prediction market to be completely decentralized with smart contracts is downright scary.
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The Gig Economy Isn't Taking Over
Today, The New York Times published a piece, "Maybe the Gig Economy Isn't Changing Work After All," which debunked a popularly held belief that the rise of Uber and other gig work would cause a rift in the relationship between companies and workers. Our white paper on the future of work had predicted the article's newfound perspective. We want to hear your thoughts!
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Pitch Perfect Security with Lending Club
We're pairing up with Lending Club to sponsor a monthly event where cybersecurity startups pitch their companies, and the audience gets to make predictions on our prediction market about how they're going to do in the next year in terms of fundraising, hiring, etc.
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