New product blockbusters: The magic and science of prediction markets

New product innovation is a strategic business activity that involves significant financial resources and managerial attention. Most new product launches fail because existing methods are unable to forecast their commercial successes accurately. In this article, we describe a market-based method to address this gap. This method capitalizes on the power of the "wisdom of crowds" by allowing people to interact in organized markets governed by well-defined rules. The working of these markets relies on five scientific principles referred to as I4C (pronounced as "I foresee"). These markets motivate people to share information freely through a price discovery process. Prediction markets seek information aggregation from a large group of diverse individuals by encouraging active participation. We demonstrate the power of the markets with real application examples from a wide variety of industries.