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?
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From the team shipping AI forecasting and sensemaking systems used by government, defense, finance, and research teams.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Cultivate Community February 2017 Newsletter
Our February 2017 newsletter is out: Take a look!
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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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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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How Trump Stumped the Prediction Markets
Why the prediction markets signaled the wrong result for the Presidential election.
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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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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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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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Three Trends Set to Revolutionize How We Work
Our new white paper about "The Future of How We Work"
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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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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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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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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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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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What Is Liquidity And How Does It Affect Prediction Markets?
Our sites use a popular prediction market algorithm called LMSR to determine how markets adjust when someone makes a forecast, and how user scores are affected by making correct and incorrect forecasts.
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Forecasting Hard Questions
I've been trying to pick NFL game winners. I'm not using any complex analytical model; rather, I'm making decisions the way most sports bettors do--I watch some games, read the news, and use my judgment. I make each of my picks on SportsCast, which allows me to track my performance, interact with other forecasters, and track the performance of the prediction market--that is, the collective performance of all the forecasters on SportsCast.
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