Kodak: A Parable of American Competitiveness
| Published: | February 6, 2012 |
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| Feature: | Research & Ideas |
| Forum: | open for comment; 15 Comments posted |
When American companies shift pieces of their operations overseas, they run the risk of moving the expertise, innovation, and new growth opportunities just out of their reach as well, explains HBS Professor Willy Shih, who served as president of Eastman Kodak's digital imaging business for several years.
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 |
|---|---|
| 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
Improving Fairness in Flight Delays
| Published: | August 31, 2011 |
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| Feature: | Research & Ideas |
| Forum: | open for comment; 5 Comments posted |
Airlines and the FAA don't like flight delays any more than passengers, but what's to be done? Assistant Professor Douglas Fearing and colleagues propose a "fairness" system that could save travelers time and service providers millions of dollars annually.
Agglomerative Forces and Cluster Shapes
| Authors: | William R. Kerr and Scott Duke Kominers |
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| Published: | January 28, 2011 |
| Paper Release Date: | December 2010 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
HBS professor William R. Kerr and doctoral candidate Scott Duke Kominers develop a theoretical model for analyzing the forces that drive agglomeration, or industrial clustering. It is rare that researchers systematically observe the forces like technology sharing, customer/supplier interactions, or labor pooling that lead to firm clustering. Instead, the data only portray the final location decisions that firms make (for example, firms that utilize one type of technology are clustered over 50 miles, while those using another technology are clustered over 100 miles). The researchers' model identifies how these observable traits can be used to infer properties of the underlying clustering forces.
Funding Unpredictability Around Stem-Cell Research Inflicts Heavy Cost on Scientific Progress
| Published: | January 5, 2011 |
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| Feature: | Op-Ed |
| Forum: | open for comment; 6 Comments posted |
Funding unpredictability in human embryonic stem-cell research inflicts a heavy cost on all scientific progress, says professor William Sahlman.
Published in 2010
Growth Through Heterogeneous Innovations
| Authors: | Ufuk Akcigit and William R. Kerr |
|---|---|
| Published: | November 23, 2010 |
| Paper Release Date: | October 2010 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
Economists have long recognized that innovation is central to economic growth and development. But as a profession, economics is just beginning to model the many types of innovations that exist and the amazing heterogeneity in the firms that conduct research and development--from General Electric to Silicon Valley start-ups. This paper provides theoretical and empirical evidence surrounding how firm size influences the types of R&D undertaken, with particular focus on choices to pursue exploration R&D (capturing new product lines) versus exploitation R&D (refining current product lines internally). From the choices made by individual firms and new entrepreneurs, the model then builds to consider aggregate economic growth. Research was conducted by Ufuk Akcigit of the University of Pennsylvania and William R. Kerr of Harvard Business School.
Published in 2009
The Challenges of Investing in Science-Based Innovation
| Published: | June 1, 2009 |
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| Feature: | Executive Education |
Smart science-based businesses view today's economic turmoil as an opportunity to stoke up research and innovation for long-term competitive advantage, says professor Vicki L. Sato. How about your business?
Published in 2008
Incompatible Assumptions: Barriers to Producing Multidisciplinary Knowledge in Communities of Scholarship
| Authors: | Corinne Bendersky and Kathleen L. McGinn |
|---|---|
| Published: | March 25, 2008 |
| Paper Release Date: | December 2007 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
Just as flows of knowledge within and across communities of practice improve the quality of new products, knowledge sharing among knowledge workers within interdisciplinary communities may be critical for new discoveries and for a more comprehensive and accurate understanding of phenomena. In spite of this, biologists tend to talk to biologists, economists tend to talk to economists, and lawyers tend to talk to lawyers. This paper argues that producing and disseminating knowledge within a multidisciplinary community of practice is enhanced when knowledge workers hold compatible assumptions, even when the form and content of knowledge generation across those workers varies.
Published in 2007
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.
The Immigrant Technologist: Studying Technology Transfer with China
| Q&A with: | William R. Kerr and Michael J. Roberts |
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| Published: | January 22, 2007 |
| Feature: | Research & Ideas |
Immigrants account for almost half of Ph.D.-level scientists and engineers in the U.S., and are prime drivers of technology development. Increasingly, however, Chinese technologists and entrepreneurs are returning home rather than staying in the U.S. to pursue opportunities. Professor William Kerr discusses the phenomena of technology transfer and implications for U.S.-based businesses and policymakers. From New Business.
Published in 2006
The Industry R&D Survey: Patent Database Link Project
| Authors: | William R. Kerr and Shihe Fu |
|---|---|
| Published: | December 8, 2006 |
| Paper Release Date: | November 2006 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
The development and diffusion of new innovations are central to economic growth, and understanding the firm-level underpinnings of technology progress is important to academics, policymakers, and business managers. While many researchers have examined (either separately or together) corporate research and development and technology diffusion, they run into two significant data constraints. William R. Kerr and Shihe Fu describe how they developed a new dataset for studying corporate innovation that encompasses three important existing datasets. This paper summarizes the Industry R&D Survey for researchers who want to study innovation through the Census Bureau's data.
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.
Mixing Students and Scientists in the Classroom
| Published: | September 6, 2006 |
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| Feature: | Lessons from the Classroom |
In his course on commercializing science and technology, Lee Fleming combines students from business, engineering, law, science, and medicine. The result: Ideas for products from scale-eating bacteria to quantum dot cancer treatments.
The Accidental Innovator
| Q&A with: | Robert D. Austin |
|---|---|
| Published: | July 5, 2006 |
| Feature: | Research & Ideas |
Many important innovations are the byproduct of accidents—the key is to be prepared for the unexpected. Professor Robert D. Austin discusses his research and practical implications on the concept of accidental innovation.
Behavioral Operations
| Authors: | Francesca Gino and Gary P. Pisano |
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| Published: | July 5, 2006 |
| Paper Release Date: | February 2006 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
Organizations often commit to more product development projects than they can handle. And while people do not always behave rationally, most research on operations management still assumes they do. This paper explores theoretical and practical ways to study the effects of behavior and cognition on operations.
Published in 2005
IPR: Protecting Your Technology Transfers
| Q&A with: | C. Fritz Foley |
|---|---|
| Published: | October 24, 2005 |
| Feature: | Research & Ideas |
Countries are adopting stronger intellectual property rights to entice international corporate investment. But who really benefits from IPR? Should multinationals feel secure that their secrets will be protected? A Q&A with professor C. Fritz Foley.
The Cycles of Theory Building in Management Research
| Authors: | Paul R. Carlile and Clayton M. Christensen |
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| Published: | July 5, 2006 |
| Paper Release Date: | February 2005 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
How do business academics know they are categorizing or measuring the best things to help us understand interesting phenomena? Scholars waste a lot of time and energy disparaging and defending various research methods. Yet the stakes are high for business academics to create theory that is intellectually rigorous, practically useful, and able to stand the tests of time. The authors describe a three-stage process for building theory; discuss the role of anomalies for building better theory; and suggest how scholars can refine research questions, carry out projects, and design student coursework.
Published in 2004
Do Managers' Heuristics Affect R&D Performance Volatility? A Simulation Informed by the Pharmaceutical Industry
| Authors: | Francesca Gino and Gary P. Pisano |
|---|---|
| Published: | July 5, 2006 |
| Paper Release Date: | December 2004, revised February 2006 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
Can the R&D process be managed to provide more certainty and success? The authors explore R&D performance volatility using the pharmaceutical industry as the model. The study looks at two types of heuristics that are commonly used to manage R&D project portfolios: (1) which products to start, and whether to continue or kill a product in development; (2) how resources should be allocated at each phase of development. By changing the heuristics used to make decisions at each stage of development, managers can decrease the amount of uncertainty and failure in the R&D process.
Caves, Clusters, and Weak Ties: The Six Degrees World of Inventors
| Q&A with: | Lee Fleming |
|---|---|
| Published: | November 29, 2004 |
| Feature: | Research & Ideas |
Your company's scientists and investors can be antennas that bring great ideas into your company. The key, says HBS professor Lee Fleming, is understanding small-world networks.
Does Speed Trump Intellectual Property?
| Published: | October 4, 2004 |
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| Feature: | What Do YOU Think? |
| Forum: | closed | 17 Comments posted |
Speed can enhance product development and innovation, but speed can also be used effectively by fast imitators to both save design costs and preempt market share.
