Industry Roadmapping with Prediction Markets

Prediction markets are already known as liquid trading sites for real money and reputation and are starting to be deployed in corporate settings such as at Google, Microsoft, HP and Pfizer for crowd sourced knowledge of product launch dates, sales forecasts and other corporate events. Information markets are now even web 2.0-ified so that you can easily create your own prediction question with Inkling Markets or build a full market with open source software from Zocalo.

Prediction markets could be useful in many other areas such as industry roadmapping where disbursed information could be aggregated in meaningful ways. Industry roadmapping, which is setting future milestones and actions in an industry as agreed upon by the industry participants, is perhaps best known in the semiconductor industry. Other industries such as nanotech (via the Foresight Institute) and virtual worlds (via the Metaverse Roadmap) have been in the early stages of implementing roadmapping.

Prediction market roadmappers could create events and enter their view of the importance and timing of these events which are then rolled into a composite easily viewed on a time graph.

Roadmapping would become continuous instead of discrete by allowing participants (anonymous or not) to remain in real-time linkage with the project and constantly update any new information to be reflected immediately in the overall outlook.