Commentary

John Foley
Editor, InformationWeek  

Startup Aims To Make The Workplace, And The World, Smarter

Austhink Software of Australia has developed an application that it says can help employees not just work smarter, but become smarter. This isn't your typical business intelligence app, but intelligence software that applies "brain mapping" to the goal of better decision making.

Austhink Software of Australia has developed an application that it says can help employees not just work smarter, but become smarter. This isn't your typical business intelligence app, but intelligence software that applies "brain mapping" to the goal of better decision making.Austhink Software was formed in 2004 as a spinoff of Austhink Consulting, an eight-year-old consultancy that trains clients in critical thinking and "structured argumentation." Following two rounds of funding, Austhink Software announced in May that it was entering the U.S. market. The company has two products: Rationale, an application that fosters critical thinking and communications skills in schools, and bCisive, an application designed to help employees structure and visualize their thoughts, or what it calls decision mapping.

While it sounds esoteric, Austhink describes bCisive as an everyday productivity tool that can be used to create and communicate business cases, share ideas, build consensus, collaborate, and document the reasoning behind business decisions.


More SMB Insights

White Papers

More >>

Reports

More >>

Webcasts

More >>

Austhink was founded by Tim Van Gelder, who served as its CEO until recently transitioning over to CTO. Van Gelder's background is as a cognitive scientist at the University of Melbourne, where he developed and used his software with students and teachers. The company has begun having success selling outside of that niche. Customers include Ernst and Young, Cypress Bioscience, KorteQ, and intelligence agencies in the United States and Australia.

The key question is whether Austhink's $349 software really makes people smarter. The company substantiates that claim by saying that students who used Rationale improved their critical thinking skills by the equivalent of 12 IQ points in a semester. Van Gelder is "convinced that business users can get smarter," too, according to the company.

Van Gelder points to Douglas Engelbart, the inventor of the PC mouse, as the inspiration for his work. In the 1960s, Engelbart postulated that, by mapping the brain's decision-making process, humans could become a "smarter race." Austhink says its software can help deliver on that theory.


Related Reading




Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

InformationWeek encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, InformationWeek moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing/SPAM. InformationWeek further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.
T-Shirt Giveaway T-Shirt Giveaway: Each week we're selecting one great comment from our readers. The author of the comment will receive an InformaitonWeek Community t-shirt. So get posting!
Subscribe to RSS

Resource Links