Companies need reliable information about the future to make decisions in the present. Strategic plans and budgets rely on good guesses about what the future holds. But typical approaches to planning are often rarefied and insulated from the real world. There's an approach developed in Switzerland and Southern California that holds real promise: Gamification.

Games are inherently competitive—which means the player with the optimal strategy prevails. That optimization can be applied to forecasting and prediction, yielding significantly better results. David Savlowitz offers a peek into gamified forecasting, a convergence of competitive gaming, investment strategy, data science, and human psychology that enables accurate forecasts.

In this session, David will explain how competitive approaches can involve a wider group that includes economists, data scientists, and non-technical staff; and how tournament models where players are rewarded for accurate predictions that maximize return on investment and minimize forecasting error.