I sat on a panel yesterday organized by Fountain Blue, a community that fosters entrepreneurial coaching and leadership in Silicon Valley.

This is how I came across Xpree.  While I was given only a 60 second elevator pitch and a 3-minute Q&A session, I immediately took to the idea of using the wisdom of the crowds to create a predictive market in the enterprise.  Specifically, in the areas of demand planning, forecasting and innovation management.  What’s even more interesting is the use of web 2.0 technologies and gaming principles to execute this idea. 

At a very high level, you create a profile, bet on the outcome of an idea that a co-worker has posted, set the metrics and see what the crowd has to say.  Top forecasters get ranked and if you use your imagination, there’s a whole social community that can be built around forecasting.  So, why would an enterprise customer care about this? Early proof points from Xpree customers show that these crowd-based forecasts, more closely align with actual outcomes than what the conventional planning tools offer today. Taking the idea one step further, this data could be fed back into existing product development and design management systems to improve products brought to market.  

There are quite a few companies in the consumer space with only a few other competitors aimed at the enterprise space such as Consensus Point, Inkling Markets and NewsFutures, so I it remains to be seen how Xpree can gain some ground.