Name: Kunu Debi Daniel Course: Academic & Business English Abstract: A Case Study Of The Idea Market

The use of idea markets refers to the practice of combining an online suggestion-box with ideaevaluation by the use of a virtual stock market. Here, the ideas and suggestions are floated on an internal stock market, within an organization or another group of stakeholders. All the participants in the stock market are handed an amount of play money, which they can use to invest in the ideas and suggestions in the market. The share price in ideas is determined by the demand. Therefore, the more people want to invest in an idea, the higher the share price. This means that participants who spot a popular idea early will stand to make more profit on his or her investment, an incentive to keep evaluating new ideas as they are shared. But, the question posed in this thesis is how such markets can impact innovation in companies. A possible structural impediment to idea markets is the market mechanism. While market mechanism is efficient for aggregating dispersed knowledge and information, it might not be effective if participants show speculator behaviour such as described in Keynesian Beauty Contests (Keynes, 1936). Surprisingly, it is found that a minority of participants following the speculator type behaviour may help market efficiency without compromising the evaluation of quality of ideas. Idea markets are claimed to represent a method for aggregating the collective intelligence and wisdom of crowds from large groups of people. Therefore the concept of collective intelligence is explored in theory and in practice in idea markets. By opening up to the philosophically rooted knowledge managements, idea markets are observed to have commensurate qualities with some types of collective intelligence. A final and more pragmatic proposition that is explored, is whether or not idea markets act as a catalyst for creativity, knowledge sharing - in other words innovation in companies. Idea markets are evaluated on the basis of a check-list comprising of 8 factors that stimulate creativity in intranets in organizations, and is found to affirm those factors. Based on the findings, the outline for a new model for innovation management is proposed. The model encompasses the use of crowd sourcing and abductive thinking. It is suggested that a balanced idea market can act as a metric for said passion. Crowd sourcing by the means of an idea market can help lessen the importance of positive and inductive justification of idea processing, leading to a more intuitive method where tacit knowledge can flow into the decision making in innovation management thus paving the way for abductive reasoning which is thought to lead to more radical and disruptive innovation. At the same time, the market as an aggregation mechanism can lead more efficient knowledge management and decentralized innovation in and around organizations.