- 13 Jan 2020
- Working Paper Summaries
Managerial Recognition as an Incentive for Innovation Platform Engagement: A Field Experiment and Interview Study at NASA
What gets workers to go the extra mile in creative problem solving? A field experiment and interviews with NASA employees finds that employees respond to managerial appreciation above other incentives.
- 09 Jan 2020
- Book
Rethinking Business Strategy in the Age of AI
For the first time in 100 years, new technologies such as artificial intelligence are causing firms to rethink their competitive strategy and organizational structure, say Marco Iansiti and Karim R. Lakhani, authors of the new book Competing in the Age of AI. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.
- 29 Oct 2019
- Working Paper Summaries
Crowdsourcing Memories: Mixed Methods Research by Cultural Insiders-Epistemological Outsiders
Research on the traumatic 1947 partition of British India has most often been carried out by scholars in the humanities and qualitative social sciences. This article presents mixed methods research and analysis to explore tensions within current scholarship and to inspire new understandings of the Partition, and more generally, mass migrations and displacement.
- 14 May 2019
- Working Paper Summaries
Do Experts Listen to Other Experts? Field Experimental Evidence from Scientific Peer Review
Influence is a fundamental aspect of collective decisions. It is thus crucial to consider not only the composition of evaluation panels but also their deliberation process. This study illuminates drivers of influence among an elite population of experts and contributes to our understanding of resource allocation in science and other expert domains.
- 18 Apr 2019
- Research & Ideas
Open Innovation Contestants Build AI-Based Cancer Tool
Radiation oncologists are few in number, especially if you are nowhere near a cancer facility. Could artificial intelligence be used to deliver an oncologist's skills for radiation therapy? Karim R. Lakhani discusses a unique open innovation experiment. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.
- 21 Mar 2019
- Working Paper Summaries
Advancing Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Research Through Open Innovation Competitions
Crowdsourcing is a way for many individuals to address a common problem. This paper describes the design and outcomes of three crowdsourcing contests focused on algorithms for 1) clustering antibody sequences, 2) imputing gene expression measurements, and 3) performing fast queries on a particular dataset. Innovation through contests greatly improved the solutions available.
- 21 Aug 2017
- Lessons from the Classroom
Companies Love Big Data But Lack the Strategy To Use It Effectively
Big data is a critical competitive advantage for companies that know how to use it. Harvard Business School faculty share insights that they teach to executives. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.
- 20 Mar 2017
- Book
Why Companies Are Placing Users at the Core of Their Innovation Strategies
In his recent edited volume Revolutionizing Innovation, Karim Lakhani brings together the latest thinking around open innovation, users, and communities. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.
- 15 Mar 2017
- Lessons from the Classroom
More Than 900 Examples of How Climate Change Affects Business
MBA students participating in Harvard Business School’s Climate Change Challenge offer ideas on how companies can negate impacts from a changing environment. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.
- 01 Jun 2016
- Working Paper Summaries
Motivating Effort in Contributing to Public Goods Inside Organizations: Field Experimental Evidence
Results of this experiment involving 1,200 employees shows that workers have multiple underlying motivations to contribute to organizational betterment, consisting of a combination of monetary and altruistic incentives associated with the organization’s mission.
- 19 May 2016
- Research Event
Crowdsourcing, Patent Trolls, and Other Research Insights Highlighted at Harvard Business School Symposium
The 2016 Faculty Research Symposium looked at current and potential collaborations between HBS and Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.
- 17 Dec 2015
- Cold Call Podcast
Designing a Great Community
Threadless has built its sizeable t-shirt retailing business by enabling its users to both design and purchase its products. But its greatest strength once presented its biggest challenge: how do you manage an online community that is 500,000-strong? Professor Karim Lakhani discusses the difficulty of hosting a city’s worth of virtual users and designers, the importance of transparency, and the lessons the Threadless case has to offer on enabling (and funding) innovation. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.
- 02 Apr 2015
- Research & Ideas
Digital Initiative Summit: The Business of Crowdsourcing
Gaining the community's trust is vital to building a successful business with crowdsourcing. Open for comment; 1 Comment(s) posted.
- 02 Apr 2015
- Research & Ideas
Digital Initiative Summit: Freeing Patient Data to Enable Innovation
It's difficult to have innovation without data—which is one reason why the health care industry in the United States is too expensive. One remedy: Make the patient the customer. Open for comment; 3 Comment(s) posted.
- 25 Feb 2015
- Lessons from the Classroom
Scholars and Students Unpack the Digital Business Revolution
Harvard Business School's Digital Initiative, led by professors Marco Iansiti and Karim Lakhani, brings an interdisciplinary approach to studying how digital technology has transformed business and innovation. Open for comment; 2 Comment(s) posted.
- 31 Jul 2014
- Research & Ideas
A Scholarly Crowd Explores Crowdsourcing
At the Open and User Innovation Workshop, several hundred researchers discussed their work on innovation contests, user-led product improvements, and the biases of crowds. Closed for comment; 1 Comment(s) posted.
- 04 Mar 2014
- Sharpening Your Skills
Sharpening Your Skills: Managing Innovation
Sharpening Your Skills curates a wide range of Harvard Business School's research and ideas around vital topics in business management. Closed for comment; 0 Comment(s) posted.
- 04 Feb 2014
- Working Paper Summaries
From Crowds to Collaborators: Initiating Effort and Catalyzing Interactions Among Online Creative Workers
Online "organizations" are becoming a major engine for knowledge development in a variety of domains such as Wikipedia and open source software development. Many online platforms involve collaboration and coordination among members to reach common goals. In this sense, they are collaborative communities. This paper asks: What factors most inspire online teams to begin to collaborate and to do so creatively and effectively? The authors analyze a data set of 260 individuals randomly assigned to 52 teams tasked with developing working solutions to a complex innovation problem over 10 days, with varying cash incentives. Findings showed that although cash incentives stimulated a significant boost of effort per se, cash incentives did not transform the nature of the work process or affect the level of collaboration. In addition, at a basic yet striking level, the likelihood that an individual chooses to participate depended on whether teammates were themselves active. Moreover, communications among teammates led to more communications, and communications among teammates also stimulated greater continuous levels of effort. Overall, the study sheds light on how perspectives on incentives, predominant in economics, and perspectives on social processes and interactions, predominant in research on organizational behavior and teams, can be better understood. Key concepts include: An individual's likelihood of being active in online collaboration increases by about 41 percent with each additional active teammate. Management could provide communications channels to make the efforts of other members more visible. This is important in the design of systems for online work as it helps members to confirm that others are actively contributing. Closed for comment; 0 Comment(s) posted.
- 05 Sep 2013
- Working Paper Summaries
Performance Responses to Competition Across Skill-Levels in Rank Order Tournaments: Field Evidence and Implications for Tournament Design
Tournaments and other rank-order incentive mechanisms have been used to model a wide range of settings: executive placement, elections, research and development and innovation contests, sports tournaments, and variable sales compensation: situations in which placing at the top of the performance rank-order leads to out-sized payoffs. This article analyzes how the level of competition and size of a tournament affects performance as a result of how strategic interactions affect contestants' incentives to exert high levels of effort. The authors estimate relationships between performance in these contests and competition levels across the full distribution of skill levels. They do this by studying data on software algorithm programming contests in which fine-grained data are available on contestant ability levels and performance over a large number of comparable contests. Findings show that while aggregate and average patterns of performance and effort may decline with increased competition, performance and effort may in fact increase among the highest-skilled contestants. The paper provides guidance to designers of innovation and crowdsourcing tournaments. Key concepts include: Tournaments and contests have a long history as a means of achieving technological advances in a range of industrial settings. For the strongest contestants, adding more contestants can produce effort-inducing rivalry. Increased competition beyond a minimum level may reduce the probability of winning to a level where incentives become depressed. However, the stimulating effect of rivalry may persist at least for highest-skilled contestants. Closed for comment; 0 Comment(s) posted.
Engineering Serendipity: The Role of Cognitive Similarity in Knowledge Sharing and Knowledge Production
By creating opportunities for cross-disciplinary scientists to meet and talk as part of a natural field experiment, this study analyzes and finds evidence for a systematic relationship between knowledge sharing and knowledge production in the sciences. Findings may extend to similar types of cross-disciplinary knowledge-sharing opportunities in other settings.