Chapter 7
Innovation
Commit to Openness, Speed, and Crowds
When the movie rental company, Netflix, decided that it needed better software to more accurately predict the movies its customers would like, it decided to look beyond its own backyard to tap into the wisdom of a broader community. The company offered a $1 million reward to the company, group, or person that would be the first to create a solution that was at least 10 percent better than its in-house software, Cinematch.
A total of 41,000 teams from 186 countries worked on the challenge for three years before two groups submitted successful solutions within 24 minutes of each other. A seven-person team of computer engineers, statisticians, and machine-learning experts from the United States, Austria, Canada, and Israel comprised the winning team, which came to be known as BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos.
When asked about the secret of BellKor's success, Chris Volinsky, who served as the leader of the BellKor team and whose day job is running the statistics research department at AT&T Labs Research, said, “All of the top teams had many discussions with many of the other top teams. We realized we needed to get in on that game in order to stay on top.”1
In the end, they did exactly that. In fact, it was only after Volinsky's original three-person team expanded to include additional minds and disciplines that a solution was reached. The team combined the individuals' several hundred algorithms to come up with the winner. That's ...
