I really liked the gamedaypassion.com presentation. First off, its a real business that is out there trying to make it and that is respectable. I love the idea as there are numerous “fan made” tees floating around and College Park games now as well. The key to being successful with this business model will depend on their ability to expand to other colleges and figure out the shipping situation - flat rate will be a pain as they continue to expand.
I think the key to moving to a new campus is going to be having a couple of designs ready to go. This will probably require research - I recommend traveling to these colleges and tailgating with the current student body as this always has positive results.
I think I will go design a tee right now!
Getting a workforce to participate in Prediction Markets is easier said than done. Many corporations face the same issues with internal wikis and blogs. One former company I worked for wanted you to use their blogging system, but only on your own time!
I think the most important factor in increasing usage of systems like prediction markets is corporate culture. At my current company, the internal wiki is a highly utilized resource. This is all due to the strong corporate culture which wiki usage is a part of. Integrating something new into a corporate culture can be a challenge, however.
Incentives and prizes tend to be the go to tools of managers to incentivize employees, but I feel like most employees see this as gimmicky and taking away from their core jobs. If the prediction market can be utilized to reinforce employees core jobs AND be made simple to use then employees will migrate to it on their own accord. This is analogous to the iTunes store - people go to iTunes for music downloads because it is the easiest and most convenient way to get digital music. If illegal file sharing networks were the easiest way to get digital music you can bet that is where the majority of consumers would get it.
The final piece of the puzzle would be ensuring that employees know this service exists and know how it can benefit them. This is basic internal marketing and a topic for another blog.
Community driven product development is a very difference process from traditional product development methods:
- Customers participate in the business - This gives customers a sense of ownership with the products.
- Building a community - Customers are actively engaged with the business
- Crowdsourcing - The best idea wins. Instant customer feedback during the product development cycle.
- Less Resources - Less marketing and product development costs for the firm.
- Uniqueness - T-Shirt companies are a dime a dozen. Threadless changed how they approached the standard business model.
There are of course advantages and disadvantages to this model. First, it can be a challenge to build the community initially. Network effects come into play here. Also, when addressing strategic changes around the business, the firm runs the risk of angering the community, which is the last thing a firm wants to do within this type of business model.
LinkedIn’s growth and dominance in the Professional Networking Services (PNS) market has been nothing short of astonishing. LinkedIn is THE PNS - they are beyond the critical mass needed to attract users purely on the fact that without being on LinkedIn those people are missing a significant opportunity.
Over the next several years, LinkedIn should focus on numerous aspects to keep growing revenues and users.
Professional Networking - First and foremost, LinkedIn is a professional networking service and that is where their focus and strategy should remain. While incorporating social features in their site is fine, they should not venture into the social networking market. This is not their core competency.
“Walled Garden” - LinkedIn should continue to provide open APIs and allow developer integration into their platform, but still keep their platform “closed.” This will ensure user’s switching costs remain high.
Premier Corporate Recruiting - LinkedIn needs to focus on becoming the premier recruiting tool for corporations across the globe. Currently, the firm does an excellent job of appealing to recruiters, but there is massive room for improvement. Some ideas would include offering algorithmic search capabilities to identify candidates or partnering with universities to help students get their information out there (possibly a student version).
International Expansion - Part of my last point was focused on global recruiting. In order to facilitate this LinkedIn would need to expand in the international market, preferably staring with Europe. The issues discussed in the case regarding Asian market expansion are significant, but should be viewed as a challenge instead of a end game.
LinkedIn hitting 100 million users is significant and it will be interesting to see where their future strategies take them.
How do Wikipedia’s processes for creating and modifying articles ever lead to high-quality results? In other words, since anyone can easily edit Wikipedia, how is it that good (and usually accurate) content emerges?
I remember when Wikipedia first started getting really big. There was a huge debate at colleges around the country on whether or not students could cite Wikipedia as research. At this point, people saw Wikipedia as unreliable, but today many people regularly cite Wikipedia. How did this occur?
Call it what you want - groupthink, the wisdom of crowds, crowdsourcing, collaborative filtering - research has shown that a diverse collection of independently-thinking people is likely to reach certain conclusions better than individuals or even experts. This has been Wikipedia’s strength. The large number of collaborators reduces bias, keeps articles neutral, and allows users to police unnecessary changes to content.
Wikipedia also has the advantage of being timely. New research can be cited immediately by multiple users as compared to traditional reference material. This information is then available immediately and open to the scrutinity of peer review.
Wikipedia itself has guided the accuracy of their online information system. They have set specific rules in place for how articles can be controlled, deleted and restored. On top of this, a full history of the articles is saved and any changes can be reverted.
I think time will see Wikipedia become more relevant as a source for data. I personally find Wikipedia to be a great research tool, but always check the citations and use those for original source information.
