Writes Dan Gillmor from Hong Kong:

Octopus is easily the world's most successful experiment to date in stored-value, electronic cash cards. Instead of pulling out bills and coins in subways, buses, fast-food restaurants and convenience stores, customers wave purses and wallets past devices that deduct dollars from their cards inside.

Octopus cards are the real thing when it comes to cash cards. They are equivalent to cash. You put value into them, spend it down and then replenish the money if you want to keep using it.

They're like cash in another crucial way. If the user prefers, they are entirely anonymous -- that is, not linked to any bank account or other personal information.

And they are a massive hit. More than 9 million have been issued, beyond saturation in a city of 6 million. (Many residents carry more than one, and tourists often buy them as well.) They're used in about 7.5 million transactions each day, most of which are mass transit fares.

The mass transit companies here created the card. They collectively own Octopus Cards, with the subway system owning a majority, says Eric Tai, Octopus' chief executive officer.

The reason just about everyone here uses the card is that just about everyone uses Hong Kong's elaborate, excellent mass transit system. That was the key to success, Tai says -- making the cards something that people would use regularly, even compulsively, without a second thought.

Writes Thomas Stewart in Business 2.0 (link via Abhay Bhagat):

Fred Smith brushed aside the C he received on the college economics paper in which he outlined his idea for an overnight delivery service. His gut told him it would work anyway. (Besides, the Federal Express (FDX) CEO later explained, "a C was a very good grade for me.") Howard Schultz had his eureka moment in Milan, Italy, when he realized that the leisurely caffeine-and-conversation caffe model would work in the United States too. Market research might have warned him that Americans would never pay $3 for a cup of coffee. But Schultz didn't need research. He just knew he could turn Starbucks (SBUX) into a bigger business, and he began, literally, shaking with excitement.

Businesspeople retell these parables to refresh their faith in sturdy virtues like risk-taking and creativity. But to researchers who study how managers think, the tales carry an obvious moral: The most brilliant decisions tend to come from the gut. While that observation is not new, it is now backed by a growing body of research from economics, neurology, cognitive psychology, and other fields. What the science suggests is that intuition -- or instinct, or hunch, or "learning without awareness," or whatever you want to call it -- is a real form of knowledge. It may be nonrational, ineffable, and not always easy to get in touch with, but it can process more information on a more sophisticated level than most of us ever dreamed. Psychologists now say that far from being the opposite of effective decision-making, intuition is inseparable from it. Without it we couldn't decide anything at all.

The practical implications of all this are profound. People who make decisions for a living are coming to realize that in complex or chaotic situations -- a battlefield, a trading floor, or today's brutally competitive business environment -- intuition usually beats rational analysis. And as science looks closer, it is coming to see that intuition is not a gift but a skill. And, like any skill, it's something you can learn.

I have made many such calls - when I started with the development of an image processing product in the early 1990s (didn't work), with IndiaWorld in 1994 (worked) and now with Emergic (still too early to say). But the gut in at least the last two cases has been complemented with a lot of reading and thinking. (And in the case of Emergic, a lot of blogging!)