MIT Sloan Management Review

Top data scientists often share three characteristics: they are creative, they are curious and they are competitive. Anthony Goldbloom, CEO of Kaggle, a company that hosts data prediction competitions, has figured out how to tap all three of these characteristics to help companies crowdsource their analytics problems.

“The kind of people we hire want to know that their work is not gathering dust on some shelf, but has a real impact on the company,” says Veronika Belokhvostova, head of Global Business Analytics at PayPal. And indeed, business analysts there are collaborating with business leaders to answer the “what should we do next?” question.