futures markets

I attend a presentation today by USC Center for Effective Organizations on the topic of "Information Futures Markets for Human Resource Planning and Management". Whew. What this basically means is using the concept of futures markets to better determine the state of affairs than traditional information gathering and analysis. Think the Hollywood Stock Exchange for your organization.

You can find basically the same presentation I heard on the presenters' Penn State website under "Narrated Presentation".

My take-aways from this are -

1. A futures price is a great aggregator of information into a single value.
2. For business, using a sports betting analogy is better than a stock market analogy due to the the smaller number of 'traders' and the ability of them to influence the market
3. Who creates the virtual commodities is critical. The very act of what is created and when is hugely important.
4. Organizations low on politics and high on innovation do best
5. The futures market is best to aggregate current information, not to make predictions.

I am also noticing USC is doing lots of interesting stuff these days. There is the Center for Effective Organizations, the EA sponsored games lab, Cory Doctorow's work with the Center for Public Diplomacy, and the new Cinematic Arts minor in video games. Hmm.