For collective intelligence to emerge instead of "groupthink", it is necessary to check the natural tendency of group members to try to minimize conflict and reach a consensus decision without critical evaluation of alternative ideas or viewpoints. As summarized in the best-selling book The Wisdom of Crowds, four conditions have to prevail: diversity of opinions, decentralization of inputs, independence of thought and information aggregation:

Choosing the right information aggregation mechanism is critical to achieving collective intelligence. For instance, when the task at hand is forecasting, prediction markets have proven particularly efficient at "consolidating the informed guesswork of many into hard probability", as The Economist recently wrote.

Lumenogic has more than a decade of experience helping companies tap their collective intelligence through prediction markets, innovation competitions and other means.