Here’s an Idea: Let Everyone Have Ideas in today’s NYT tantalizes and annoys. Although the article never uses the words prediction market or similar (idea futures, decision market) it seems to describe a wildly successful internal prediction market at Rite-Solutions (see below for link), though I have to wonder whether the company isn’t giving more credit to its internal stock market than is warranted (a product line suggested via the market just a year ago now accounts for 30 percent of sales — either their salespeople are expert at pushing vapor or the product was already under development) for the press.

InnoCentive, the other company profiled, seems to be a freelancing site for biologists and chemists, much like RentACoder.

The article attempts to segue between the stories:

The next frontier is to tap the quiet genius that exists outside organizations — to attract innovations from people who are prepared to work with a company, even if they don’t work for it.

I agree that’s an interesting frontier, but contracting out solutions, while good and useful, differs wildly from using a market to make or inform decisions. What could’ve been an interesting story on either company turned into another breezy zeitgeist article.

In any case, a company might want to open parts of its internal prediction market to its customers, suppliers, shareholders, or even the public. I don’t think either mentions prediction markets (I’ve only skimmed), but this would very much be in the spirit of Democratizing Innovation and Collaboration Rules.

Here’s a suggestion for Rite-Solution’s stock market — get a real web site (symbol: WWW). The Flash thing at http://ritesolutions.com is from bizarro world — looks a little bit like a web site, but really slow, totally pointless transitions, and utterly unlinkable. A good reminder what the net would be like without open formats and standards.