Outside Innovation

Predicting the Future Using Crowdsourcing?

If you enjoy watching opinions take shape and believe in the wisdom of smart crowds, you may want to take a look at the Sloan Center for Internet Retailing’s eLab eXchange.

Want to help Google figure out the best way to monetize YouTube? Want to see what monetization ideas others have? Would you like to see which of these ideas get the most traction quickly? What do you think the level of online retail sales will be for the last quarter of this year? Will it increase, despite the economic downturn, because more and more of us do more and more of our shopping online? Which are the most influential social buying Web sites? Which are the most popular and influential online deal Web sites?

If you like predicting the future and think you’re pretty prescient on these topics, you can vote, predict, nominate, and see which way the predictions are going.

In fact, if your predictions are right, you might be the monthly winner ($25 gift certificate) or the quarterly winner ($500).

Back to School at the African Rural University for Women

On the topic of customer-led strategy and innovation, I’m really sorry to be missing the opening week for the second year of the African Rural University for Women (ARU) in Kampala, Uganda. Last year, this innovative educational institution welcomed 30 young women to begin their three-year training as Community Transformation Leaders. This year, an additional 30 young women have entered the program. ARU is based on an already thriving campus that is a showcase for customer-led innovation and grass roots integrated rural development. You can learn more about ARU and its parent organization—the 20-year-successful Uganda Rural Development and Training Programme (URDT) at http://www.urdt.net.