Great article in the New York Times today about using virtual futures markets to get market insights.

The gist is that instead of just paying lip service, corporate America is finally getting religion on the value of the collective intelligence of their employees and partners. They've seen that virtual games like the Hollywood Stock Exchange, where people buy and sell virtual stock in film projects while they're in production, are better predictors of future outcomes than, say, the results of focus groups and other polls.

According to the NYT article, Cisco, Best Buy and Google are among the big companies that are testing this kind of approach, using tools developed by the likes of HP and Accenture.

It seems like this kind of tool will be especially useful to larger companies, which benefit from having a large pool of "players"--stakeholders like employees and business partners.

How can smaller companies take advantage of this?