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C
HAPTER
9
Reign in the Tyranny of Ideas 
 I 
’ 
m the decider, and I decide what is best.
—
G. W. Bush
 Ninety percent of [science
fi 
ction] is crud, but then,ninety percent of everything is crud.
—
 Theodore Sturgeon
c09 8 January 2013; 19:1:16
161
 
 T 
here is one problem with everything we have told you so far. If  you succeed, you will find yourself with many, many ideas orproposals or even prototypes. We have taken to calling it the
tyrannyof ideas 
.Organizational decision-making has not lacked approaches toselecting the best ideas; methods like SWOT (strengths, weaknesses,opportunities, and threats), cost 
–
benefit analysis, or decision tree analysismight all sound familiar. But the output from crowdstorming is at ascale that these approaches never anticipated. Our concern, then, is not to review 
all 
decision-making frameworks, but simply to highlight what appears to be working best when dealing with large numbers of ideas.
W
HEN
I
DEAS
C
AN
B
E
T
ESTED
 Among the things we emphasized when asking for ideas was to makesure you knew how complete you wanted the answer to be. In other words
—
are you looking for a sketch on the back of a napkin, or a fully functioning business (or any number of stages in between)? Whensubmissions take the form of working prototypes, you can directly measure the proposals
’
merit to find the best 
—
 whatever it is in yourcase (for example, the fastest time, the least amount of error, or thelowest cost). A good example of direct testing is Netflix, which asked data sci-entists to help them improve the way they made movie recommenda-tions. Though the company had developed its own recommendationsystem, Cinematch, they thought there was an opportunity for improve-ment. They believed that by sharing their data and asking external talent for help, they would be able to come up with a better algorithm
—
thereby improving their ability to help customers find the movies they would
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love. They knew the $1,000,000 prize they were offering would garner alot of responses
—
so they needed a robust approach to fairly andaccurately evaluate them. Their criteria was straightforward: We provide you with a lot of anonymous rating data, and aprediction accuracy bar that is 10 percent better than what Cinematch can do on the same training data set. (Accuracy isa measurement of how closely predicted ratings of moviesmatch subsequent actual ratings.) If you develop a systemthat we judge most beats that bar on the qualifying test set  we provide, you get serious money and the bragging rights.But (and you knew there would be a catch, right?) only if  you share your method with us and describe to the worldhow you did it and why it works.
1
Core to the success of the Netflix challenge
—
asking for ideas that could be tested and having a system to evaluate lots of ideas. Another example of direct testing comes from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), whose Red BalloonChallenge we discussed in Chapter 6. To recap: DARPA wanted toexplore the roles that the Internet and social networking play in real-time communications. During the challenge, teams had to locate 10 redballoons placed around the United States and then report their findingsto DARPA. The difficulty in this scenario was the distributed nature of the contest that required teams to be smart about using onlineresources. The genius of DARPA 
’
s approach to their challenges wasthat they did not need to consume resources to identify the best ideas. They structured the challenge in a way that allowed them to easily evaluate responses to determine which teams arrived at the right answers first.How did they do it? Though DARPA had more than 4,000entrants, they managed to create a system that let them easily identify the best submissions. Participants had to submit answers in the form of coordinates for the location of the distributed balloons over the courseof the day. They could quickly check these coordinates against the
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EIGN IN THE
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YRANNY OF
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DEAS
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