"The Crowd Is Wise (When It’s Focused)"

Robert Bell, foreground, and Chris Volinsky, both of AT&T, are collaborating with other scientists to improve Netflix's personalized film ratings.

Source: STEVE LOHR, The New York Times, July 18, 2009

The article states that:

(A) look at recent cases and new research suggests that open-innovation models succeed only when carefully designed for a particular task and when the incentives are tailored to attract the most effective collaborators.......

The Netflix Prize is a stellar example of crowdsourcing. In October 2006, Netflix, the movie rental company, announced that it would pay $1 million to the contestant who could improve the movie recommendations made by Netflix’s internal software, Cinematch, by at least 10 percent.......

The contest will end next week because a contestant finally surpassed the 10 percent hurdle on June 26, and, according to the rules of the competition, rivals have 30 days from that date to try to beat the leader. The frontrunner is a seven-person team, and its members are statisticians, machine learning experts and computer engineers from the United States, Austria, Canada and Israel. It is led by statisticians at AT&T Research.

Comment: Too often people assume that a good idea is all that is necessary, but it seems that good implementation is usually the key, and good implementation usually involves someone working smart and working hard! JAD