Netflix Challenge: ‘More Shots on Goal’

The Harvard Magazine website posted an article which noted that in citizen science, crowdsourcing has largely focused on relatively simple, discrete tasks: classifying images of galaxies, for instance. But both research and industry are beginning to explore how open-ended goals like innovation can benefit from the power of crowds. In 2006, DVD-rental and online video-streaming company Netflix sought to improve the accuracy of its video-recommendation algorithm, which suggests new movies based on users’ previous video preferences. The Netflix Prize was a recent, high-profile example of what has been termed “open innovation,” a mindset that has prompted research enterprises from academia to industry to look beyond their institutional boundaries for solutions.

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