Making data science a sport.

Kaggle is an innovative solution for statistical/analytics outsourcing.  It is the leading platform for predictive modeling competitions. Companies, governments and researchers present datasets and problems - the world's best data scientists then compete to produce the best solutions.

At the end of a competition, the competition host pays prize money in exchange for the intellectual property behind the winning model.

See the site for details. 


Comments:

This is an example of crowd source model.  Another model approached from different angle is Amazon Mechanical Turk, where each task is broken down into pieces and each person does one piece and gets paid a tiny amount of money.