La magia de los premios

Leí sobre el Netflix Prize en Fortune. Al igual que el X Prize y otras iniciativas similares, el premio apeló a la ambición de miles de programadores repartidos por el mundo y a la capacidad de Internet para juntarlos y permitirles poner en evidencia su energía innovadora. Vale la pena estudiarlo a fondo porque el mismo modelo puede utilizarse para solucionar problemas de alcance público:

"The Netflix Prize may be the Internet era´s most visible example of user-generated innovation: More than 40.000 teams representing 186 countries submitted entries.

(...)

What happened next is a case study in digital collaboration and online game theory. Temas of two and three people, as well as individuals, made progresss in the initial months of the contest, but it soon became clear to the entrants -and Netflix- that winning the prize would require more manpower and the pooling of ideas across multiple disciplines. Some contestants began posting findings online, and new temas started forming, disbanding, and re-forming".