Karim R. Lakhani

Harvard University | Harvard · Technology and Operations Management Unit

The last two decades have witnessed an extraordinary growth of new models of managing and organizing the innovation process that emphasizes users over producers. Large parts of the knowledge economy now routinely rely on users, communities, and open innovation approaches to solve important technological and organizational problems. This view of inn...

Most of society's innovation systems--academic science, the patent system, open source, etc.--are "open" in the sense that they are designed to facilitate knowledge disclosure among innovators. An essential difference across innovation systems is whether disclosure is of intermediate progress and solutions or of completed innovations. We present ex...

Contests are a historically important and increasingly popular mechanism for encouraging innovation. A central concern in designing innovation contests is how many competitors to admit. Using a unique data set of 9,661 software contests, we provide evidence of two coexisting and opposing forces that operate when the number of competitors increases....

Selecting among alternative projects is a core management task in all innovating organizations. In this paper, we focus on the evaluation of frontier scientific research projects. We argue that the “intellectual distance” between the knowledge embodied in research proposals and an evaluator’s own expertise systematically relates to the evaluations...

The rapid advances in generative artificial intelligence (AI) open up attractive opportunities for creative problem-solving through human-guided AI partnerships. To explore this potential, we initiated a crowdsourcing challenge focused on sustainable, circular economy business ideas generated by the human crowd (HC) and collaborative human-AI effor...

This study empirically investigates claims of the increasing ubiquity of artificial intelligence (AI) within roughly 80 million research publications across 20 diverse scientific fields, by examining the change in scholarly engagement with AI from 1985 through 2022. We observe exponential growth, with AI-engaged publications increasing approximatel...

Collective creativity and innovation are key determinants of various important outcomes ranging from competitiveness of an organization to GDP growth of a country. As a result, this topic has attracted widespread scholarly interest from different disciplines, including strategic management, entrepreneurship, production and operations management, in...

Competence development in digital technologies, analytics, and artificial intelligence is increasingly important to all types of organizations and their workforce. Universities and corporations are investing heavily in developing training programs, at all tenure levels, to meet the new skills needs. However, there is a risk that the new set of lucr...

Competence development in digital technologies, analytics, and artificial intelligence is increasingly important to all types of organizations and their workforce. Universities and corporations are investing heavily in developing training programs, at all tenure levels, to meet the new skills needs. However, there is a risk that the new set of lucr...

Contests that non‐contestants consume for entertainment are a fixture of economic, cultural and political life. We exploit injury‐induced changes to teams' line‐ups in a professional sports setting to examine whether individuals prefer to consume contests that have more uncertain outcomes. Studying data from the Australian Football League, we use a...

This study investigates the capability of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in creating innovative business solutions compared to human crowdsourcing methods. We initiated a crowdsourcing challenge focused on sustainable, circular economy business opportunities. The challenge attracted a diverse range of solvers from a myriad of countries and...

There are long-standing concerns that peer review, which is foundational to scientific institutions like journals and funding agencies, favors conservative ideas over novel ones. We investigate the association between novelty and the acceptance of manuscripts submitted to a large sample of scientific journals. The data cover 20,538 manuscripts subm...

Although citations are widely used to measure the influence of scientific works, research shows that many citations serve rhetorical functions and reflect little-to-no influence on the citing authors. If highly cited papers disproportionately attract rhetorical citations then their citation counts may reflect rhetorical usefulness more than influen...

Data is fundamental to machine learning-based products and services and is considered strategic due to its externalities for businesses, governments, non-profits, and more generally for society. It is renowned that the value of organizations (businesses, government agencies and programs, and even industries) scales with the volume of available data...

The evaluation and selection of novel projects lies at the heart of scientific and technological innovation, and yet there are persistent concerns about bias, such as conservatism. This paper investigates the role that the format of evaluation, specifically information sharing among expert evaluators, plays in generating conservative decisions. We...

Two surveys of principal investigators conducted between April 2020 and January 2021 reveal that while the COVID-19 pandemic’s initial impacts on scientists’ research time seem alleviated, there has been a decline in the rate of initiating new projects. This dimension of impact disproportionately affects female scientists and those with young child...

The COVID-19 pandemic has necessitated social distancing at every level of society, including universities and research institutes, raising essential questions concerning the continuing importance of physical proximity for scientific and scholarly advance. Using customized author surveys about the intellectual influence of referenced work on scient...

Publishing in top journals is crucial to academic careers, but many fields show substantial ethnic disparities in publication counts, which may be caused by disparities in producing manuscripts or getting them accepted. Here, we investigate the latter mechanism using the peer review files of 16.5K manuscripts submitted between 2013-2018 to a field-...

Extensive research has documented the immediate impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on scientists, yet it remains unclear if and how such impacts have shifted over time. Here we compare results from two surveys of principal investigators, conducted between April 2020 and January 2021, along with analyses of large-scale publication data. We find that t...

Motivation Do machine learning methods improve standard deconvolution techniques for gene expression data? This article uses a unique new dataset combined with an open innovation competition to evaluate a wide range of approaches developed by 294 competitors from 20 countries. The competition’s objective was to address a deconvolution problem criti...

Clayton Christensen's groundbreaking theory of “disruptive innovation” has proven to be one of the most influential management ideas of the last several decades. In this book, business and management experts—many of them Christensen's colleagues and former students—discuss the innovation challenges that lie ahead. Building on Christensen's work, th...

Research Summary We investigate how knowledge similarity between two individuals is systematically related to the likelihood that a serendipitous encounter results in knowledge production. We conduct a field experiment at a medical research symposium, where we exogenously varied opportunities for face‐to‐face encounters among 15,817 scientist‐pairs...

Whereas the pandemic has tested the agility and resilience of organizations, it forces a deeper look at the assumptions underlying theoretical frameworks that guide managerial decisions and organizational practices. In this commentary, we explore the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on technology and innovation management research. We identify key a...

COVID-19 has not affected all scientists equally. A survey of principal investigators indicates that female scientists, those in the ‘bench sciences’ and, especially, scientists with young children experienced a substantial decline in time devoted to research. This could have important short- and longer-term effects on their careers, which institut...

Periapical radiolucencies, which can be detected on panoramic radiographs, are one of the most common radiographic findings in dentistry and have a differential diagnosis including infections, granuloma, cysts and tumors. In this study, we seek to investigate the ability with which 24 oral and maxillofacial (OMF) surgeons assess the presence of per...

The COVID-19 pandemic has undoubtedly disrupted the scientific enterprise, but we lack empirical evidence on the nature and magnitude of these disruptions. Here we report the results of a survey of approximately 4,500 Principal Investigators (PIs) at U.S.- and Europe-based research institutions. Distributed in mid-April 2020, the survey solicited i...

Bitcoin represents the first real-world implementation of a “decentralized autonomous organization” (DAO) and offers a new paradigm for organization design. Imagine working for a global business organization whose routine tasks are powered by a software protocol instead of being governed by managers and employees. Task assignments and rewards are r...

Overview: Innovation managers rarely use crowdsourcing as an innovative instrument despite extensive academic and theoretical research. The lack of tools available to compare and measure crowdsourcing, specifically contests, against traditional methods of procuring goods and services is one barrier to adoption. Using ethnographic research to unders...

Citations are ubiquitous in evaluating research, but how exactly they relate to what they are thought to measure (quality and intellectual impact) is unclear. We investigate the relationships between citations, quality, and impact using a survey with an embedded experiment in which 12,670 authors in 15 academic fields describe about 25K specific re...

A recurring problem in biomedical research is how to isolate signals of distinct populations (cell types, tissues, and genes) from composite measures obtained by a single analyte or sensor. Existing computational deconvolution approaches work well in many specific settings, but they might be suboptimal in more general applications. Here, we describ...

In industry after industry, data, analytics, and AI-driven processes are transforming the nature of work. While we often still treat AI as the domain of a specific skill, business function, or sector, we have entered a new era in which AI is challenging the very concept of the firm. AI-centric organizations exhibit a new operating architecture, red...

Following the publication of this article [1], it was noted that the author list was incomplete and was missing the following three authors.

Purpose This article offers insight on how to effectively help incumbent organizations prepare for global business shifts to open source and digital business models. Design/methodology/approach Discussion related to observation, experience and case studies related to incumbent organizations and their efforts to adopt open source models and busines...

Open data science and algorithm development competitions offer a unique avenue for rapid discovery of better computational strategies. We highlight three examples in computational biology and bioinformatics research in which the use of competitions has yielded significant performance gains over established algorithms. These include algorithms for a...

Open source software (OSS) development has become increasingly popular among companies. Examples even include former opponents of OSS such as Microsoft. The active involvement of companies in OSS development leads to a growing overlap between OSS communities and companies. Different organizational forms, cultures, norms, ideologies, and practices a...

Open source software (OSS) development has become increasingly popular among companies. Examples even include former opponents of OSS such as Microsoft. The active involvement of companies in OSS development leads to a growing overlap between OSS communities and companies. Different organizational forms, cultures, norms, ideologies, and practices a...

Purpose This paper presents NASA’s experience using a Center of Excellence (CoE) to scale and sustain an open innovation program as an effective problem-solving tool and includes strategic management recommendations for other organizations based on lessons learned. Design/methodology/approach This paper defines four phases of implementing an open...

Importance Radiation therapy (RT) is a critical cancer treatment, but the existing radiation oncologist work force does not meet growing global demand. One key physician task in RT planning involves tumor segmentation for targeting, which requires substantial training and is subject to significant interobserver variation. Objective To determine wh...

Understanding why employees go the extra mile at work is a key problem for many organizations. We conduct a field experiment at a medical organization to study motivations for employees to submit project proposals for organizational improvement. In total, we analyze 1237 employees, 118 proposals, and quality evaluations for more than 12,000 evaluat...

Open data science and algorithm development competitions offer a unique avenue for rapid discovery of better computational strategies. We highlight three examples in computational biology and bioinformatics research where the use of competitions has yielded significant performance gains over established algorithms. These include algorithms for anti...

Climb atop shoulders and wait for funerals. That, suggested Newton and then Planck, is how science advances (more or less). We’ve come far since then, but many notions about how people and practices, policies, and resources influence the course of science are still more rooted in traditions and intuitions than in evidence. We can and must do better...

Background: Frontline staff are well positioned to conceive improvement opportunities based on first-hand knowledge of what works and does not work. The innovation contest may be a relevant and useful vehicle to elicit staff ideas. However, the success of the contest likely depends on perceived organizational support for learning; when staff belie...

Open innovation processes promise to enhance creative output, yet we have heard little about successful launches of new technologies, products, or services arising from these approaches.We believe we’ve hit on an important hidden factor for this failure and that it holds the key to a successful integration and execution of open innovation methods.

The purpose of this article is to suggest a (preliminary) taxonomy and research agenda for the topic of “firms, crowds, and innovation” and to provide an introduction to the associated special issue. We specifically discuss how various crowd-related phenomena and practices—for example, crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, user innovation, and peer producti...

We present the results of a field experiment conducted at Harvard Medical School to understand the extent to which search costs affect matching among scientific collaborators. We generated exogenous variation in search costs for pairs of potential collaborators by randomly assigning individuals to 90-minute structured information-sharing sessions a...

Background: The association of differing genotypes with disease related phenotypic traits offers great potential to both help identify new therapeutic targets and support stratification of patients who would gain the greatest benefit from specific drug classes. Development of low cost genotyping and sequencing has made collecting large scale genoty...

Online communities frequently create significant economic and relational value for community participants and beyond. It is widely accepted that the underlying source of such value is the collective flow of knowledge among community participants. We distinguish the conditions for flows of tacit and explicit knowledge in online communities and advan...

Most United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) patent documents contain drawing pages which describe inventions graphically. By convention and by rule, these drawings contain figures and parts that are annotated with numbered labels but not with text. As a result, readers must scan the document to find the description of a given part label....