CIO Symposium Contributor

Bio

Karim R. Lakhani is an Associate Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School and the Principal Investigator of the Crowd Innovation Lab and NASA Tournament Lab at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science. He specializes in the management of technological innovation in firms and communities. His research is on distributed innovation systems and the movement of innovative activity to the edges of organizations and into communities. He has extensively studied the emergence of open source software communities and their unique innovation and product development strategies. He has also investigated how critical knowledge from outside of the organization can be accessed through innovation contests. Currently Prof. Lakhani is investigating incentives and behavior in contests and the mechanisms behind scientific team formation through field experiments on the TopCoder platform and Harvard Medical School.

Prof. Lakhani was awarded his Ph.D. in management from MIT. He also holds an MS in Technology and Policy from MIT, and a Bachelor's in Electrical Engineering and Management from McMaster University in Canada. He has also worked in sales, marketing and new product development at GE Healthcare and was a consultant with The Boston Consulting Group.