Want to generate some excitement about your company's future and possibly identify its financial future at the same time? Run your own Shark Tank.
Read moreCrowdfunding, the practice of financing a project by sourcing small investments from a large number of people, has exploded in the past decade as an alternative funding source. Established companies looking to adopt the agile principles of startups have begun to use external enterprise crowdfunding to gain indicators from their consumers, but with Cultivate Ignite, companies can now gain critical business indicators and insights from employees using internal crowdfunding.
Read moreIt may be easier to manipulate a real-money market than a play-money market. In a play-money market, the dumb-money can always be defeated with smart money and a little vigilance.
Read moreTwo things I believe: 1. Software developers should occasionally sneak jokes into their code, to make life more fun, and to make sure the person reviewing their code is paying attention.
Read moreCultivate Labs is expanding Cultivate Ignite, an internal crowdfunding platform for enterprises, to include a self-service package for small and medium sized businesses to find and fund the best ideas in their companies.
Read moreA multinational energy company uses Cultivate Forecasts predict economic and geopolitical events that impact oil and gas prices. We find out why they decided to incorporate internal crowdsourcing within their business and how they have been so successful at engaging employee participation.
Read moreWe've all participated in group brainstorming sessions in both academic and business settings at some point complete with whiteboards, Post-it notes, and afternoons around a conference table. Though it has been proven that brainstorming, especially in group settings, doesn't work, people continue to look to it as the go-to technique for stimulating creativity. When the afternoon session is over, someone takes a picture of the whiteboard and promises to follow up with the team. And that's as fa
Read moreif companies, especially the large ones, want lasting innovation - the kind that permeates everything they do, the kind where “innovation” never has to be spoken about, i.e. “let’s be innovative,” they just are by design, there are two things that have to be fundamentally re-thought...
Read moreThis week we welcome a new addition to the team. Cathryn Wile, who currently resides in Denver, will be joining us to lead our marketing efforts.
Read moreAs a small bootstrapped company, we're constantly worrying about our next stage of growth. And of course start up orthodoxy says any size business should have a few key performance metrics they track to be aware of how you're doing in the things that influence revenue, profit, and the culture you want to cultivate. But as we've learned, it's not enough to just track your KPI's, you need to forecast how you're going to do on them weeks and months ahead of time.
Read moreWith an election coming next month in the Netherlands, Marco van Schaardenburgh has successfully launched Prendid, a “voorspellingsmarkt” (prediction market) where players are predicting the outcome of the parliamentary elections. Joining is free and available to anyone globally.
Read moreBroadspectrum, whose parent organization is Ferrovial, is an Australian company that operates in the Defence, Property, Social, Infrastructure, Resources and Industrial sectors, and provide Logistics, Facilities Management, Consulting, Construction, Care, Welfare, Operations, Maintenance, Well Servicing, and Business Support services. We recently completed a pilot project in their Defence line of business...
Read moreOur February 2017 newsletter is out: Take a look!
Read moreThanks to the Illinois Technology Association (of which we are a member) for publishing our guest blog post on toxic corporate culture. We make the argument that before you can heavily invest in shiny new technology as you prepare for the #futureofwork, you should look to make positive changes to your culture first to take maximum advantage of your investment.
Read moreIn the application itself, we created a feature you won’t find on Kickstarter - a “refund” button - to encourage employees to move their investments around.
Read moreWhy the prediction markets signaled the wrong result for the Presidential election.
Read moreWhat if you tried to supplant the entire funding model inside organizations to not only mimic VC rounds, but use crowdfunding to decide what ideas/projects/initiatives should get resources?
Read moreWe recently had an article run in the Huffington Post about the future of work and what skills will be the most valuable given the new ways organizations will be structured and their desires to be more agile...
Read moreHow does probability forecasting play a role in informing conclusions as to when tornadoes, and of what size and frequency, will occur? More on this and the Summer Tornado Forecasting Contest.
Read moreOur new white paper about "The Future of How We Work"
Read moreUsing crowdsourcing only at the front-stages of the product development cycle means organizations are missing out on a big opportunity to further tap the wisdom and knowledge of the organization. Here's how you can use internal crowdsourcing across your entire development lifecycle.
Read moreFor years, companies of all shapes and sizes have utilized the power of the crowd to research, test, and drum up support for their products or service offerings. It makes sense — tapping into the external crowd can not only power idea generation at scale and in real time, but it can also drive engagement among your most important brand ambassadors.Traditionally, market research has dictated that customers (or people like them) are always the best sources of information. But this is limiting...
Read moreOne of our developers left Cultivate recently to go work for a much larger company - an experience he has never had before. They are throwing more money at him than we ever could, and he will work on a team larger than our entire company...
Read moreIt is incredible that a company of Uber's size, with the experience they have entering new markets is still having the kinds of colossal failures they are having in Germany. But Uber is certainly not alone in costly missteps like this and billions are being lost every year. Yet a solution already exists: your employees.
Read moreI enjoyed John Horgan's piece on Bayes Theorem for Scientific American. Bayes Theorem and Bayesian reasoning are highly applicable when thinking about forecasting and prediction markets; indeed, one prediction market built a Bayes Net into its platform. In this post I'll explain what Bayesian reasoning is, why it matters to prediction markets, and give a concrete (but semi-fictitious) example of how it's applied.
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