Case Studies - Staff on Demand

• Netflix Prize. In September 2009, Netflix was still an online DVD-rental company making forays into video streaming. It announced a contest—with a prize of $1 million—for the best online filtering algorithm to predict user ratings based on previous ratings. Teams of the best and brightest code writers from around the world formed and in time merged. Over three years, the winning team—BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos—beat Netflix’s own algorithm for predicting ratings by 10.06%. Meanwhile, the competition made Netflix famous. 

• Dabbawala. The teeming Indian metropolis of Mumbai, it is said, is built upon Dabbawala, a network of an estimated 5,000 bicycle-based food delivery workers. The box lunches they deliver are prepared by women, often working out of private homes and taken to a nearby train station. The train carries the boxes downtown, where they are distributed workers in various offices. Dabbawala delivers as many as 200,000 lunchboxes a day, on time and with an accuracy of 99.9%. 

• Catalonia. The government of Spain’s Catalonia region manages a globally distributed intelligence network of expat experts that serves as mentors on specific topics. Catalonia Trade & Investment (CT&I), a government agency under the Ministry for Business and Knowledge of the Government of Catalonia, is responsible for strategies that enhance Catalonia’s position as a global center for business, innovation, and talent. The 40 offices of the CT&I global network provide services to 24,000 companies a year and work with committed companies to build capabilities, innovate, and internationalize. In January 2019, CT&I launched Catalonia Exponential, based in Silicon Valley, to accelerate the innovation economy in Catalonia and the transformation of Catalan startups, SMEs, and large companies. Catalonia Exponential found a novel, low-cost way to do just that: a Staff On Demand program that manages a distributed intelligence network of loyal expatriate Catalonian experts to mentor local companies on becoming ExOs. Notably, they developed an MTP: to increase Catalonia’s impact on the world economy.

• Medellín, Colombia. The Colombian Supreme Court set out to transform the country’s justice system. It did so by inviting teams of entrepreneurs to participate in an incentive-prize program with alternating periods of cooperation and competition. The goal: use exponential technologies to develop breakthrough solutions to create massive positive change. The program’s radical openness is a critical part of its success. The cooperation of local government, business, and educational communities, in combination with dedicated and passionate local community members, creates unprecedented connection and common purpose and strengthens the likelihood that changes will “take.” As a result, interested parties no longer instinctively react negatively to new ideas but instead have a commitment to their success. 

• Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk). MTurk connects and commodifies human labor to accomplish micro-tasks—officially called “Human Intelligence Tasks”—such as information gathering (completing surveys, online research) or data processing (e.g., image identification). Once a micro-task—for example, transcribing line items of a scanned receipt or labeling image data for machine learning—has been codified into a process, it can be created and bundled on the Amazon MTurk platform. This way, human labor can be accessed to accomplish tasks that may not yet be possible (or that may be cost-prohibitive) to accomplish with full automation. Typically, each task takes only seconds to accomplish and carries cent- or sub-cent-level rewards. Labor around the world can flexibly sign up and carry out work packages of tasks at their own pace and availability. For individuals, the comparative hourly rate is often competitive or superior to local job opportunities and also more flexible.

• Sweep South. This South African domestic cleaning service, founded in 2014, is disrupting the industry by using technology to provide customers with verified, highly-rated cleaners, gardeners, and other domestic workers from what has, until now, been an otherwise informal labor segment. Sweep South uses a proprietary online platform that handles bookings, worker ratings, and other salient data and services. As a measure of its success, Sweep South has been one of the country’s most successful enterprises in terms of obtaining international investments.