Karim R. Lakhani

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Karim R. Lakhani (born c. 1970) is a technology management and innovation expert and is the Charles E. Wilson Professor of Business Administration and the Dorothy and Michael Hintze Fellow at the Harvard Business School. The founder and co-director of the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard, he is best known for his pioneering scholarship on Open Source Software and Crowdsourcing^[1] innovation models (open and user innovation), and digital transformation of companies and industries. In particular, he is known for his research on the T-shirt company Threadless,^[2][3] and prize-based open innovation firms like InnoCentive^[4][5][6] and Topcoder.

His most recent book, Competing in the Age of AI: Strategy and Leadership When Algorithms and Networks Run the World (co-authored with Marco Iansiti) investigates how data, analytics, and AI-driven processes are transforming industries and the nature of work and how AI-centric organizations are redefining how they create, capture, share, and deliver value. With examples such as Airbnb, Microsoft, and Amazon, the book explores how AI-driven processes are scalable, propel scope increase, enable companies to straddle industries, and drive ever more accurate, complex, and sophisticated predictions which provide a competitive edge.

Lakhani is the principal investigator of the NASA Tournament Laboratory at the Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science, and the faculty co-founder of the Harvard Business School Digital Initiative.

He has partnered with NASA, Topcoder, and the Harvard Medical School to conduct field experiments on the design of crowd innovation programs. He serves on the Board of Directors of Mozilla and Local Motors.

Education[]

Lakhani earned a Bachelor in Engineering Management in 1993 at McMaster University, a Master of Science in Technology and Policy in 1999, and a Ph.D. in Management in 2006 at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His Ph.D. dissertation was advised by Eric von Hippel, with Tom Allen and Wanda Orlikowski.

Books[]

• Competing in the Age of AI: Strategy and Leadership When Algorithms and Networks Run the World. With Marco Iansiti. Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, in press.
• Revolutionizing Innovation: Users, Communities, and Open Innovation. With Dietmar Harhoff. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016.
• Editor, Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software. With Joe Feller, Brian Fitzgerald, and Scott Hissam. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005.

Articles[]

Lakhani has authored articles and leading case studies across a wide range of topics.

• • Winsor, John, Jin Hyun Paik, Michael Tushman, and Karim R. Lakhani. "Overcoming Cultural Resistance to Open Source Innovation." Strategy & Leadership (forthcoming).
  • Blasco, Andrea, Michael G. Endres, Rinat A. Sergeev, Anup Jonchhe, Max Macaluso, Rajiv Narayan, Ted Natoli, Jin H. Paik, Bryan Briney, Chunlei Wu, Andrew I. Su, Aravind Subramanian, and Karim R. Lakhani. "Advancing Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Research Through Open Innovation Competitions." PLoS ONE 14, no. 9 (September 2019).  
  • Richard, Elizabeth E., Jeffrey R. Davis, Jin Hyun Paik, and Karim R. Lakhani. "Sustaining Open Innovation Through a 'Center of Excellence'." Strategy & Leadership 47, no. 3 (2019): 19–26.
  • Mak, Raymond H., Michael G. Endres, Jin Hyun Paik, Rinat A. Sergeev, Hugo Aerts, Christopher L. Williams, Karim R. Lakhani, and Eva C. Guinan. "Use of Crowd Innovation to Develop an Artificial Intelligence-Based Solution for Radiation Therapy Targeting." doi:10.1001/jamaoncol.2019.0159. JAMA Oncology 5, no. 5 (May 2019): 654–661.
  • Blasco, Andrea, Olivia S. Jung, Karim R. Lakhani, and Michael Menietti. "Incentives for Public Goods Inside Organizations: Field Experimental Evidence." Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 160 (April 2019): 214–229.  
  • Felin, Teppo, and Karim R. Lakhani. "What Problems Will You Solve with Blockchain? Before Jumping on the Bandwagon, Companies Need to Carefully Consider how Ledger Technologies Fit into their Overall Strategy." Reprint 60115. MIT Sloan Management Review 60, no. 1 (Fall 2018).
  • Jung, Olivia, Andrea Blasco, and Karim R. Lakhani. "Innovation Contest: Effect of Perceived Support for Learning on Participation." Health Care Management Review (June 2018).  
  • Boudreau, Kevin, Tom Brady, Ina Ganguli, Patrick Gaule, Eva C. Guinan, Anthony Hollenberg, and Karim R. Lakhani. "A Field Experiment on Search Costs and the Formation of Scientific Collaborations." Review of Economics and Statistics 99, no. 4 (October 2017): 565–576.
  • Hill, Andrew, Po-Ru Loh, Ragu B. Bharadwaj, Pascal Pons, Jingbo Shang, Eva C. Guinan, Karim R. Lakhani, Iain Kilty, and Scott Jelinsky. "Stepwise Distributed Open Innovation Contests for Software Development: Acceleration of Genome-Wide Association Analysis." GigaScience 6, no. 5 (May 2017).  
  • Iansiti, Marco, and Karim R. Lakhani. "Managing Our Hub Economy: Strategy, Ethics, and Network Competition in the Age of Digital Superpowers." Harvard Business Review 95, no. 5 (September–October 2017): 84–92.  
  • Felin, Teppo, Karim R. Lakhani, and Michael L. Tushman. "Firms, Crowds, and Innovation." Special Issue on Organizing Crowds and Innovation. Strategic Organization 15, no. 2 (May 2017): 119–140. (doi: 10.1177/1476127017706610.)  
  • Iansiti, Marco, and Karim R. Lakhani. "The Truth about Blockchain." Harvard Business Review 95, no. 1 (January–February 2017): 118–127.
  • Faraj, Samer, Georg von Krogh, Eric Monteiro, and Karim R. Lakhani. "Online Community as Space for Knowledge Flows." Information Systems Research 27, no. 4 (December 2016): 668–684.  
  • Riedl, Christoph, Richard Zanibbi, Marti A. Hearst, Siyu Zhu, Michael Menietti, Jason Crusan, Ivan Metelsky, and Karim R. Lakhani. "Detecting Figures and Part Labels in Patents: Competition-based Development of Graphics Recognition Algorithms." International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition (IJDAR) 19, no. 2 (June 2016): 155–172. (Published online before print, February 2016.)  
  • Boudreau, Kevin J., Karim R. Lakhani, and Michael E. Menietti. "Performance Responses to Competition Across Skill-Levels in Rank Order Tournaments: Field Evidence and Implications for Tournament Design." RAND Journal of Economics 47, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 140–165.  
  • Boudreau, Kevin J., Eva Guinan, Karim R. Lakhani, and Christoph Riedl. "Looking Across and Looking Beyond the Knowledge Frontier: Intellectual Distance and Resource Allocation in Science." Management Science 62, no. 10 (October 2016).  
  • Jeppesen, Lars Bo, and Karim R. Lakhani. "Marginality and Problem-Solving Effectiveness in Broadcast Search." Organization Science 21: 1016–1033.
  • Lakhani, Karim R., and Jill A. Panetta. "The Principles of Distributed Innovation." Innovations: Technology, Governance, Globalization 2, 3: 97–112.
  • Lakhani, Karim R., and Eric Von Hippel. "How open source software works:"free" user-to-user assistance." Research policy 32.6 (2003): 923-943.
  • Von Krogh, Georg, Sebastian Spaeth, and Karim R. Lakhani. "Community, joining, and specialization in open source software innovation: a case study." Research Policy 32.7 (2003): 1217-1241.
  • Lakhani, Karim R., and Robert G. Wolf. "Perspectives on free and open source software." (2005): 3-23.

References[]

External links[]

• Harvard Business School Interview with Lakhani