"I believe that there are many problems in companies that look a lot like the problem Netflix faced — such as insurance underwriting, oil exploration, or evaluating an employee's probable success. As long as the problem has lots of structured data and clear outcome variables (and the company can successfully design a way to keep customer and proprietary data safe) it makes sense to design a competition that uses the market in ideas. Then you just have to decide how much it is worth to you to have a 10% advantage over the competition on a key issue."