REBUTTAL: SalesForce, StarBucks and Dell demonstrate that enterprise prediction markets as intra-corporation communication tools (as opposed to forecasting tools) are overhyped by the prediction market software vendors and a little clique of uncritical courtisans.
Chris F. Masse April 17th, 2008
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Dell’s IdeaStorm
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No need of trading technology to get feedback and suggestions from employees. A simple voting mechanism is more than enough.
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- Business , Business Cases & Case Studies , Marketing & Internet Marketing
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The Boston Globe article seems to mistake effort for value.
@Michael Giberson: “The Boston Globe article seems to mistake effort for value.” Hey, you said too little… or too much. Care to elaborate, doc?
It is noteworthy that our client InterContinental Hotels Group contemplated the SalesForce-powered Dell Idea Storm before choosing NewsFutures’ Idea Pageant solution instead.
@Emile Servan-Schreiber: Interesting factoid, indeed.
Chris, my point is that you can’t measure the usefulness of a system by how many resources it consumes. Take another look at the article, making note of any improvements in results that are mentioned.
I see one thing only, “corporate marketing experts” are impressed by “the heavy traffic it’s drawn and the message Starbucks is sending.” Of course, this improvement in Starbucks reputation among corporate marketing experts is probably of modest value to the company, and probably wasn’t an intended goal of the program. So maybe, on recount, no real improvements in results so far.
I would say it is too soon to reach any conclusions about the usefulness of the program, and even if it turns out to be an expensive failure, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth trying.
But it is also way off base to suggest, as our initial blog poster suggested, that this effort by Starbucks somehow implies a devaluation of enterprise prediction markets.
In fact, per Emile’s comment which indicates that NewsFutures offers both prediction market and idea generation/evaluation services, the two tools address somewhat different information aggregation needs for the company.
[...] Makes sense, doc. [...]