Abstract: The American online video rental shop Netflix has offered 1,000,000 US-dollar for the team who is able to improve the movie recommendations made by Netflix’s internal software, Cinematch, by at least 10 percent. It took 3 years until a team surpassed the 10 percent hurdle. The winner team is an international cooperation of some of the top teams of the competition.

Driver: Economic / Industrial
Companies increasingly realise the benefits of open innovation models and reward them accordingly. Higher prizes lure more talented and skilled people and thereby increase the chances of success.

Obstacle: Political
There is no clear framework for intellectual property rights in collaborative innovation processes.

Indication: Change in current innovation patterns
Such outstanding highly rewarded open innovation models do not aim at collecting as much as ideas as possible from e.g. customers, but rather on attracting highly skilled professional teams that combine their knowledge to solve a daunting challenge.

Comment: This could change current academic / professional career patterns towards “Increasing liberalisation of academic field”

Source: Internet: In the blog of the innovation platform Atizo.com → link to an article on nytimes.com