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Friday, August 08, 2008

Second City Provides Online Discovery

A colleague sends along a paper from Second City. In North America you know them from the comedic actors that have come from their group over the years. They are also doing coaching, team building, innovation and related work as part of their corporate services division. They have now teamed with Northwestern University's Intelligent Information Lab to produce something they call the Intelligence Engine. This is a successor to a research project called Buzz. The Intelligence Engine is

" ... a system that finds and organizes stories and opinion related to topics, people, products and companies ... focused on market intelligence ... the intelligence engine uses a combination of static terms and story indicators to mine the blogosphere, collecting stories in which the author describes emotionally compelling situations related to that topic ... "
Fascinating notion, need to see how it works live. Does not appear to be available online, so have not been able to try it.

Second City is not the only troupe that is doing corporate work. RADA (The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art) also does this kind of training. We attended their team building session in London a few years ago. Our experiences gave new meaning to the phrase 'trained at the royal academy'. :) RADA has no intelligence engine to my knowledge.

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