Harvard researchers experiment with open innovation | Harvard Magazine

"IN CITIZEN SCIENCE, crowdsourcing has largely focused on relatively simple, discrete tasks: classifying images of galaxies, for instance, or tracking birds in the backyard. 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. Rather than tackle the problem internally, the company announced an open contest: it would publish an anonymized set of user data and challenge programmers all over the world to develop an algorithm that improved prediction accuracy by 10 percent. “We’re quite curious, really,” the contest statement begins. “To the tune of one million dollars.” 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. The concept is not without historical precedent: in the eighteenth century, the British government famously established the Longitude Prize, seeking a solution to the seemingly intractable problem of east-west navigation at sea (see 'Longitude: How the Mystery Was Crack’d,' March-April 1994, page 44). Its £20,000 (worth about $4.25 million today) were awarded in 1765 to clockmaker John Harrison for his invention of the chronometer; by allowing sailors to keep accurate time, the marine clock offered a horological solution to what had often been considered an astronomical problem ..."