Cultivate Labs Blog
Discussing how crowd forecasting, internal crowdfunding, and other new workplace trends can be used to improve the #futureofwork
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By Adam Siegel on May 19, 2017
How to Run Your Own Shark Tank with Internal Crowdfunding
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.
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By Cultivate Labs on May 11, 2017
Introducing Enterprise Crowdfunding for Established Companies
Crowdfunding, 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.
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By Adam Siegel on May 09, 2017
Attempted Manipulation of our French Election Prediction Market: Here's What We Learned
It 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.
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By Ben Golden on May 04, 2017
How I snuck a super bad pun into our application
Two 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.
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By Cultivate Labs on Apr 20, 2017
Cultivate Ignite: Announcing Internal Crowdfunding Solution for Teams
Cultivate 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.
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By Cultivate Labs on Apr 18, 2017
Multinational Energy Company Uses Crowdsourcing to Predict Impacting Factors of Oil & Gas Prices
A 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.
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By Cultivate Labs on Apr 18, 2017
Brainstorming doesn't work. To cultivate better ideas, try internal crowdfunding instead.
We'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
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By Adam Siegel on Apr 06, 2017
Just Start Asking
if 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...
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By Adam Siegel on Mar 23, 2017
Welcome Cathryn Wile
This 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.
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By Adam Siegel on Feb 28, 2017
Have your team predict your KPI's in real-time so you can actually meet your KPI's
As 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.
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By Adam Siegel on Feb 16, 2017
Prendid - A Dutch Election Voorspellingsmarkt (Prediction Market)
With 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.
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By Adam Siegel on Feb 15, 2017
Testing Crowdsourced Decision Making at Broadspectrum
Broadspectrum, 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...
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By Jess Price on Feb 07, 2017
Cultivate Community February 2017 Newsletter
Our February 2017 newsletter is out: Take a look!
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By Adam Siegel on Jan 31, 2017
Is Toxic Culture Killing Your Company?
Thanks 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.
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By Vanessa Pineda on Dec 19, 2016
What Happens When You Provide a Refund Mechanism in a Crowdfunding App?
In the application itself, we created a feature you won’t find on Kickstarter - a “refund” button - to encourage employees to move their investments around.
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By Vanessa Pineda on Nov 22, 2016
How Trump Stumped the Prediction Markets
Why the prediction markets signaled the wrong result for the Presidential election.
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By Adam Siegel on Nov 17, 2016
Radical Budgeting: Introduce a Crowdsourced VC Model for Inside Your Organization
What 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?
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By Adam Siegel on Oct 13, 2016
Future of Work: What skills will be most valuable?
We 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...
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By Cultivate Labs on Jun 09, 2016
Calling all Tornado Enthusiasts
How 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.
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By Adam Siegel on May 10, 2016
Three Trends Set to Revolutionize How We Work
Our new white paper about "The Future of How We Work"
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By Adam Siegel on Apr 25, 2016
Disrupting Product Development Using Internal Crowdsourcing
Using 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.
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By Adam Siegel on Mar 17, 2016
How Internal Crowdsourcing Will Transform the Way We Do Business
For 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...
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By Adam Siegel on Feb 10, 2016
The Circle of (Work) Life
One 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...
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By Adam Siegel on Jan 11, 2016
Uber's Costly Fail in Germany is Symptomatic of an Age-Old Problem in Big Companies
It 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.
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By Ben Golden on Jan 08, 2016
Bayesian Reasoning and Prediction Markets
I 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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