In most organizations, information doesn't flow smoothly from the bottom rungs to the C-suite. Not only do communication hierarchies act as barriers, but staffers have little to gain by being brutally honest with their managers.

Some companies have looked at internal social networks as a way to spread knowledge around, but unless they're allowing anonymous posting, that doesn't do much for the honesty problem.

Could an internal predictive market do better? Yesterday, a company called Crowdcast introduced what it describes as corporate forecasting software, allowing employees to make predictions about their employer--and explain their reasoning.

"Employees know what's really going on in a corporation, but that information rarely reaches management's ears," said Crowdcast CEO Mat Fogarty in a statement. "By tapping employee intelligence, Crowdcast channels this raw knowledge into actionable business intelligence."

But predictive markets have been slow to catch on in businesses, as noted by the Economist earlier this year. While it cites internal markets in place at Koch Industries-a chemical company that asks staffers to estimate the future cost of raw materials-and financial firms like Lloyds TSB and Wells Fargo, the article also points out that it can be a challenge to keep employees interested.

If employees don't know how the information is used, why should they care? And then there's the question of the reward. While they're using virtual money, winners can get prizes like "gift cards or lunch with the boss," according to the New York Times. "Gift cards are sent anonymously through the Crowdcast system. Even if the names of star predictors are revealed for prizes like a lunch, managers do not know which bets they made on which questions, only that they were highly accurate."

Sounds like an awkward lunch date to me.

But as a former Hollywood Stock Exchange addict, I can attest to the appeal of virtual markets, even though real money isn't at stake.

There's been a lot of debate about the accuracy of predictive markets, but Crowdcast says that its pilot customers, which include Electronic Arts, General Motors and Warner Brothers, have seen success.

According to Crowdcast, a panel of scientists and doctors at a pharmaceutical company client is predicting regulatory decisions and new drug sales with 86 percent more accuracy than traditional forecasts. And a media firm customer's 1,200 employees are making sales and ship date forecasts with 61 more accuracy than management.

Five customers is a pretty small sample size, and we'll see how many employees are still interested in using the platform a year from now. But Crowdcast might just help predictive markets enter the enterprise.