Another addition to the open-source participation economy is the contest for the creation of new futures contracts. It's being staged on MarketsWiki - an online open source knowledge base for current and historical information about the global exchange traded capital, derivatives, environmental and related OTC markets, with idea and opinion contributions being encouraged from investors and traders alike.
The 'Great Contract Challenge' provides another illustration of the prospective benefits of crowd sourcing. In other words, tapping the 'wisdom of the crowds' offers greater innovation potential than traditional approaches which have viewed and relied on exchanges as the source of new/novel financial instrument creation. Prospective customers' involvement in the design and selection of those instruments which appear most promising, should also constitute a form of natural selection and help ensure only the fittest new products make it to market.
Aside from the shift in mental models, the contest also underlines the departure from traditional approaches to control - of information and processes - and a move towards participation, transparency and democratised decision-making. Admittedly, the contest is being staged in the public domain, where such ideas have already found fertile ground, and social networking and idea-sharing sites, and tools in support thereof, are now relatively commonplace. Nevertheless, there's also increasing evidence of this type of change occurring in many professional service organisations, not least of which being their growth in the adoption and adaptation of social tools tailored to suit their business purposes.
Even if those organisations don't subscribe to an 'innovate or die' approach apparent in the derivatives sector, they still need to pay careful attention to the strong steady changes fostering teamwork, dialogue and learning, being nutured by their more adventurous competitors. To that end, we're now seeing ever increasing interest in the customisation and use of tools such as wikis, blogs, social bookmarking, tagging and RSS to help better connect knowledge workers with current relevant information and expertise to extract value from complexity and commoditisation alike. Those same tools which support MarketsWiki and other collaboration environments.
As noted by Bruce MacEwan in his recent blog about law firms, billing hours and complexity:
"There will always be both ['expert' and 'commoditized service]. That said, I think what constitutes either will evolve. Some of what is viewed as expert now - will devolve into commodity. New areas (unseen before - maybe new types of financings to emerge from the current crisis) may be the new "expert" (i.e., the always-sought-after high value engagements) areas."
To lubricate this information -> knowledge transformation cycle, and for firms to extract value from it, they need to make it far easier for their staff to generate, find, share and use information and expertise. One straightforward way to do this is through the use of malleable systems which are shaped by and emerge from people's interactions with them. Systems which not only give people a better platform on which to work, but which can also make use of the trails people create as they search, bookmark, rate or view things - all very simply stuff focusing on supporting and gathering intelligence from people's interaction with the system. And when these individual activities are aggregated, they provide powerful indicators of what is most useful or important to people across the breadth of the organisation. Another example of crowd sourcing - but this time applied internally - to tap and share the wealth of knowledge which otherwise occurs in casual exchanges, via email or other channels, and can so easily be lost in organisations which fail to innovate, or at least improve, their current information and technology environments.
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