The world loves a challenge
Thousands of economists and other stats geeks have been spending hours and hours helping Netflix improve its movie-suggestion algorithms. Netflix is offering a million dollar reward to the first person (or team) to reach a 10% improvement. They're giving interested parties 100 million ratings (more than 700mb of information) from their own database to test their theories. (The Freakonomics authors have written on it in their blog a couple of times: 1 & 2).
If you mix in some creativity with a dash of inspiration, I'd think you could steal this idea. Here are the essential elements: offer a distinct and hard challenge (it doesn't have to be as quantifiable as Netflix's), open up your resources that can aid those interested, and come up with an incentive that will be valuable to your audience (or a niche of your audience).
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Comments
Check out Innocentive.com for how you can solve some challenging chemistry problems (not all require access to a laboratory) for cash. This site, a few years old now, really pioneered the idea of casting broadly on the Web to solve problems.
Posted by: Robert Rich | November 16, 2006 5:15 PM