Data Prediction Competitions -- Far More than Just a Bit of Fun

Data prediction competitions facilitate a step change in the evolution of analytics outsourcing. They offer companies and researchers a cost effective way to harness the `cognitive surplus' of data scientists who are hungry for real-world data and motivated to excel whatever the prize. Competitions are effective because there are any number of techniques that can be applied to any modeling problem but we can't know in advance which will be most effective. By exposing the problem to a wide audience, competitions are an effective way to reach the frontier of what is possible from a given dataset.