Karim R. Lakhani
There are 10 articles for this faculty member.
Open Innovation and Organizational Boundaries: The Impact of Task Decomposition and Knowledge Distribution on the Locus of Innovation
| Authors: | Karim R. Lakhani and Michael L. Tushman |
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| Published: | February 3, 2012 |
| Paper Release Date: | January 2012 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
Open innovation, enabled by low-cost communication and the decreased costs of memory and computation, has transformed markets and social relations. In contrast to firm-centered innovation, open innovation is radically decentralized, peer based, and includes intrinsic and pro-social motives. In this paper the authors use in-depth examples from Apple, NASA, and Lego to argue that in contexts of increasing modularity and decreased communication costs, open innovation will at least complement, if not increasingly substitute for, more traditional innovation modes. For this reason emerging theories of innovation, organizational design, and leadership for innovation must be informed by these contrasting innovation modes and the implications for governance, incentives, intellectual property, managerial choice, professional and organizational identity, and organizational cultures.
Published in 2011
Getting to Eureka!: How Companies Can Promote Creativity
| Published: | August 22, 2011 |
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| Feature: | Research & Ideas |
| Forum: | open for comment; 19 Comments posted |
As global competition intensifies, it's more important than ever that companies figure out how to innovate if they are going to maintain their edge, or maintain their existence at all. Six Harvard Business School faculty share insights on the best ways to develop creative workers.
The Contingent Effect of Absorptive Capacity: An Open Innovation Analysis
| Authors: | Andrew A. King and Karim R. Lakhani |
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| Published: | April 26, 2011 |
| Paper Release Date: | April 2011 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
Does experience with adopting technology improve a person's capacity for inventing better technology? On the other hand, does invention experience increase the capacity for adoption? This paper explores how adoption and invention affect each other, using data from several programming competitions sponsored by The MathWorks Corporation. Research was conducted by Andrew A. King of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College and Karim R. Lakhani at Harvard Business School.
Published in 2010
Data.gov: Matching Government Data with Rapid Innovation
| Published: | November 16, 2010 |
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| Feature: | Lessons from the Classroom |
Data.gov is a young initiative of President
The Determinants of Individual Performance and Collective Value in Private-Collective Software Innovation
| Authors: | Ned Gulley and Karim R. Lakhani |
|---|---|
| Published: | March 4, 2010 |
| Paper Release Date: | February 2010 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
Why do people expend personal time and effort toward creating a public good? Over the past decade, collaborative, community-based approaches to developing knowledge-intensive products like encyclopediae, music, and software have gained prominence in both practice and scholarly analysis. "Open source software development," for example, is distinguished by self-selection of distributed participants into tasks, free revealing of knowledge, collective creation of shared software artifacts, and participants' ability to generate new innovations by reinterpreting and repurposing knowledge and artifacts created by others. The MathWorks' Ned Gulley and HBS professor Karim R. Lakhani study the determinants of individual performance and collective value in software innovation by analyzing 11 programming competitions that mimic the working of the open source software community.
Published in 2009
Markets or Communities? The Best Ways to Manage Outside Innovation
| Q&A with: | Karim R. Lakhani |
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| Published: | July 20, 2009 |
| Feature: | Research & Ideas |
No one organization can monopolize knowledge in any given field. That's why modern companies must develop a new expertise: the ability to attract novel solutions to difficult or unanticipated problems from outside sources around the world. A conversation with Harvard Business School professor Karim R. Lakhani on the keys to managing distributed innovation.
Published in 2008
Parallel Search, Incentives and Problem Type: Revisiting the Competition and Innovation Link
| Authors: | Kevin J. Boudreau, Nicola Lacetera, and Karim R. Lakhani |
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| Published: | November 14, 2008 |
| Paper Release Date: | September 2008 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
The innovation process is fraught with uncertainty. Managers often do not know ahead of time the ideal mix of individuals and skills needed to solve innovation-related problems. One way around this uncertainty is to have multiple paths, approaches, or designs explored at once. The "parallel search" principle can be used inside the firm just as it may be used more generally by pursuing "open innovation". However, having too many searchers attempting to solve the same problem can undercut the benefits if it leads to less effort and investment. The authors study the outcomes of 645 software development contests, conducted by a software outsourcing vendor, involving over 9,000 coders, to understand the relationship between parallel search and increasing competition and innovation.
Published in 2007
HBS Cases: How Wikipedia Works (or Doesn't)
| Published: | July 23, 2007 |
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| Feature: | Research & Ideas |
For HBS professor Andrew McAfee, Wikipedia is a surprisingly high-quality product. But when his concept of "Enterprise 2.0" turned up on the online encyclopedia one day—and was recommended for deletion—McAfee and colleague Karim R. Lakhani knew they had the makings of an insightful case study on collaboration and governance in the digital world.
The Value of Openness in Scientific Problem Solving
| Authors: | Karim R. Lakhani, Lars Bo Jeppesen, Peter A. Lohse, and Jill A. Panetta |
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| Published: | February 7, 2007 |
| Paper Release Date: | January 2007 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
Scientists are generally rewarded for discoveries they make as individuals or in small teams. While the sharing of information in science is an ideal, it is seldom practiced. In this research, Lakhani et al. used an approach common to open source software communities—which rely intensely on collaboration—and opened up a set of 166 scientific problems from the research laboratories of twenty-six firms to over 80,000 independent scientists. The outside scientists were able to solve one-third of the problems that the research laboratories were unable to solve internally.
Published in 2006
Open Source Science: A New Model for Innovation
| Q&A with: | Karim R. Lakhani |
|---|---|
| Published: | November 20, 2006 |
| Feature: | Research & Ideas |
Borrowing a practice that is common in the open source software community, HBS professor Karim R. Lakhani and colleagues decided to see how "broadcasting" might work among scientists trying to solve scientific problems. The results? Promising for many types of innovation, as he explains in this Q&A.
