After 3 years and 50,000 entries Netflix is ready to announce the winner of its movie recommendation challenge – or are they? While the contest ended on Sunday, two teams are reportedly in a dead heat for the million dollar prize. In fact, Netflix has delayed officially announcing the winner to validate the results – yes it was that close between the top 2 teams (BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos, The Ensemble). So what was the challenge and -- more importantly -- the key lessons learned? The challenge was to improve Netflix’s movie recommendation engine by 10% - a task requiring deep expertise in predictive modeling and statistical scoring, which makes the 50,000 entries all the more impressive. However, one of the more interesting phenomena’s that resulted was the participation and collaboration among team members and eventually across teams in the later stage of the contest. Once the benchmark of 10% was passed, it set off a 30 day race that allowed other teams some time to surpass it. What actually occurred was fascinating – teams and rivals merged, consortiums were built and passions were ignited. So much so that one team, started their own company to develop recommendation systems for e-commerce players.

So what was THE key lesson learned?

• Participation & collaboration and teamwork leads to innovation and invention: When you engage a community great things can happen. There are countless examples of communities generating great ideas – My Starbucks Idea, Dell’s IdeaStorm and others. However, when you get the community to collaborate and you build teams comprised of different yet complementary skills sets truly amazing things can happen. This is why the Netflix participatory marketing program will be one that will be studied for many years to come. Not only did Netflix receive some great ideas on how to solve the problem, but they got a diverse group of people from around the global to focus on building a solution that they could not otherwise buy or build themselves.

For me the Netflix program reminds me a little bit of what 3M is so famous for – that is their ability to assemble small teams to collaborate and innovate new products. But while 3M pulls its talent from within the company, Netflix tapped into the social web to reach and engage the best minds in the world to solve their problem – amazing. So the next time your company faces what seems like an insurmountable challenge – ask yourself how would the “community” solve this?

‘Till Next Time