Karim R. Lakhani

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Karim R. Lakhani (born c. 1970) is the Dorothy & Michael Hintze Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He is the principal investigator of the Crowd Innovation Lab at the Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science. [1] His research and teaching focuses on open innovation and user innovation. Lakhani is the founder and one of the principal investigators of the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard (LISH). [2]

Contents

Life and work

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.

Lakhani edited the book Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software ( ISBN   0-262-06246-1) published by MIT Press. [3]

In addition to Open Source, Lakhani also studies crowdsourcing. [4] In particular, he is known for his research on the T-shirt company Threadless, [5] [6] and prize-based open innovation firms like InnoCentive [7] [8] [9] & Topcoder.

Selected publications

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Innovation</span> Practical implementation of improvements

Innovation is the practical implementation of ideas that result in the introduction of new goods or services or improvement in offering goods or services. ISO TC 279 in the standard ISO 56000:2020 defines innovation as "a new or changed entity, realizing or redistributing value". Others have different definitions; a common element in the definitions is a focus on newness, improvement, and spread of ideas or technologies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">MIT Sloan School of Management</span> Business school of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Sloan School of Management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology is the business school of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT Sloan offers bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degree programs, as well as executive education. Its degree programs are among the most selective in the world. MIT Sloan emphasizes innovation in practice and research. Many influential ideas in management and finance originated at the school, including the Black–Scholes model, the Solow–Swan model, the random walk hypothesis, the binomial options pricing model, and the field of system dynamics. The faculty has included numerous Nobel laureates in economics and John Bates Clark Medal winners.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open-design movement</span> Movement for product development with publicly shared designs

The open-design movement involves the development of physical products, machines and systems through use of publicly shared design information. This includes the making of both free and open-source software (FOSS) as well as open-source hardware. The process is generally facilitated by the Internet and often performed without monetary compensation. The goals and philosophy of the movement are identical to that of the open-source movement, but are implemented for the development of physical products rather than software. Open design is a form of co-creation, where the final product is designed by the users, rather than an external stakeholder such as a private company.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eric von Hippel</span> American economist

Eric von Hippel is an American economist and a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, specializing in the nature and economics of distributed and open innovation. He is best known for his work in developing the concept of user innovation – that end-users, rather than manufacturers, are responsible for a large amount of innovation. In order to describe this phenomenon, in 1986 he introduced the term lead user.

Social computing is an area of computer science that is concerned with the intersection of social behavior and computational systems. It is based on creating or recreating social conventions and social contexts through the use of software and technology. Thus, blogs, email, instant messaging, social network services, wikis, social bookmarking and other instances of what is often called social software illustrate ideas from social computing.

Arthur Robert von Hippel was a German American materials scientist and physicist. Von Hippel was a pioneer in the study of dielectrics, ferromagnetic and ferroelectric materials, and semiconductors and was a codeveloper of radar during World War II.

User innovation refers to innovation by intermediate users or consumer users, rather than by suppliers. This is a concept closely aligned to co-design and co-creation, and has been proven to result in more innovative solutions than traditional consultation methodologies.

Open innovation is a term used to promote an information age mindset toward innovation that runs counter to the secrecy and silo mentality of traditional corporate research labs. The benefits and driving forces behind increased openness have been noted and discussed as far back as the 1960s, especially as it pertains to interfirm cooperation in R&D. Use of the term 'open innovation' in reference to the increasing embrace of external cooperation in a complex world has been promoted in particular by Henry Chesbrough, adjunct professor and faculty director of the Center for Open Innovation of the Haas School of Business at the University of California, and Maire Tecnimont Chair of Open Innovation at Luiss.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Crowdsourcing</span> Sourcing services or funds from a group

Crowdsourcing involves a large group of dispersed participants contributing or producing goods or services—including ideas, votes, micro-tasks, and finances—for payment or as volunteers. Contemporary crowdsourcing often involves digital platforms to attract and divide work between participants to achieve a cumulative result. Crowdsourcing is not limited to online activity, however, and there are various historical examples of crowdsourcing. The word crowdsourcing is a portmanteau of "crowd" and "outsourcing". In contrast to outsourcing, crowdsourcing usually involves less specific and more public groups of participants.

Lead user is a term developed by American economist Eric von Hippel. His definition for lead user is:

  1. Lead users face needs that will be general in a marketplace – but face them months or years before the bulk of that marketplace encounters them, and
  2. Lead users are positioned to benefit significantly by obtaining a solution to their needs and so may innovate.

The Arrow information paradox, and occasionally referred to as Arrow's disclosure paradox, named after Kenneth Arrow, American economist and joint winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics with John Hicks, is a problem faced by companies when managing intellectual property across their boundaries. It occurs when they seek external technologies for their business or external markets for their own technologies. It has implications for the value of technology and innovations as well as their development by more than one firm, and for the need for and limitations of patent protection.

The term private-collective model of innovation was coined by Eric von Hippel and Georg von Krogh in their 2003 publication in Organization Science. This innovation model represents a combination of the private investment model and the collective-action innovation model.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Georg von Krogh</span>

Georg von Krogh is a Norwegian organizational theorist and Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and holds the Chair of Strategic Management and Innovation. He also serves on Strategy Commission at ETH Zurich.

In management, Joy's law is the principle that "no matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else,” attributed to Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy. Joy was prompted to state this observation through his dislike of Bill Gates' view of "Microsoft as an IQ monopolist." He argued that, instead, "It's better to create an ecology that gets all the world’s smartest people toiling in your garden for your goals. If you rely solely on your own employees, you’ll never solve all your customers' needs." Core to this principle is the definition of smart within the context of the quotation. Smart "refers to capability but not willingness to work for someone." Furthermore, "the fact that you are smart for one company does not make you smart for another." Richard Pettinger, Director of Information Management for Business, UCL The law highlights an essential problem that is faced by many modern businesses, "that in any given sphere of activity most of the pertinent knowledge will reside outside the boundaries of any one organization, and the central challenge [is] to find ways to access that knowledge."

Know-how trading is a web-based research and design phenomenon related to open innovation and crowdsourcing. It denotes fee-based knowledge markets that treat knowledge and expertise as commodities that can be traded for financial gain. It therefore differs from other information markets such as Yahoo! Answers in that solution providers are financially rewarded for their efforts. The challenges set therefore tend to be more focused, and solutions more detailed and lengthy.

Toolkits for user innovation and custom design are coordinated sets of “user-friendly” design tools. They are designed to support users who may wish to develop products or services for their own use. The problem toolkits are developed to solve is that, while user designers may know their own needs better than do producers, their technical design skills may be less than those of producer-employed developers. For example, expert users of tennis rackets – or expert users of custom integrated circuits – generally know more than producers do about the function they want a product to serve. However, they are often not as good as producer engineers at actually designing the product they need.

Crowdsourcing software development or software crowdsourcing is an emerging area of software engineering. It is an open call for participation in any task of software development, including documentation, design, coding and testing. These tasks are normally conducted by either members of a software enterprise or people contracted by the enterprise. But in software crowdsourcing, all the tasks can be assigned to or are addressed by members of the general public. Individuals and teams may also participate in crowdsourcing contests.

Open collaboration is any "system of innovation or production that relies on goal-oriented yet loosely coordinated participants who interact to create a product of economic value, which is made available to contributors and noncontributors alike." It is prominently observed in open source software, but can also be found in many other instances, such as in Internet forums, mailing lists and online communities. Open collaboration is also thought to be the operating principle underlining a gamut of diverse ventures, example including bitcoin, TEDx, and Wikipedia.

Susumu Ogawa is a professor of Innovation and Marketing, Graduate School of Business Administration, Kobe University, Japan.

Dr. Carliss Y. Baldwin is an American economist and the William L. White Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. Her book on modularity in complex technological systems, Design Rules, published in 2000 and co-written with Kim B. Clark, has been called "a landmark book" that has impacted research on organization theory, competitive strategy, and innovation.

References

  1. "MIT Sloan CIO Symposium: Karim Lakhani". MIT Sloan CIO Symposium . 2015-05-18. Retrieved 2015-05-30.
  2. "Karim R. Lakhani". lish.harvard.edu. Retrieved 22 March 2023.
  3. Feller, Joseph; Fitzgerald, Brian; Hissam, Scott A.; Lakhani, Karim R., eds. (2005). Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software. MIT Press. ISBN   9780262062466.
  4. Unrau, J. Jack (2007-07-10). "The Experts at the Periphery". Wired Magazine. Retrieved 2010-04-24.
  5. Chafkin, Max (2008-06-01). "The Customer is the Company: How Threadless Uses Crowdsourcing". Inc. Magazine. Retrieved 2010-04-24.
  6. Sipress, Alan (2007-06-18). "T-Shirt Maker's Style, Drawn From Web Users". The Washington Post. ISSN   0740-5421 . Retrieved 2010-04-24.
  7. Dean, Cornelia (2008-07-22). "If You Have a Problem, Ask Everyone". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2010-04-24.
  8. Travis, John (2008-03-28). "Science by the Masses". Science. 319 (5871): 1750–1752. doi:10.1126/science.319.5871.1750. PMID   18369115. S2CID   19778826.
  9. Wessel, David (2007-01-25). "Prizes for Solutions to Problems Play Valuable Role in Innovation". Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 2010-04-24.