Teamwork, Innovation and Diversity

I was really impressed with this article from today’s NY Times:

Netflix Competitors Learn the Power of Teamwork

I was particularly fond of this quote:

The biggest lesson learned, according to members of the two top teams, was the power of collaboration. It was not a single insight, algorithm or concept that allowed both teams to surpass the goal … Instead, they say, the formula for success was to bring together people with complementary skills and combine different methods of problem-solving

I think it provides an excellent example of the benefits received due to open collaboration (with distributed, diverse teams). Furthermore, I think it identifies a powerful and sustainable value creation and commercialization approach for open source projects.

What do you think? I think Eclipse does some of this already, but how can we improve things?