Karim R. Lakhani
Karim R. Lakhani
Assistant Professor of Business Administration
| Unit | Technology and Operations Management |
|---|---|
| Contact | (617) 495-6741 Send E-Mail |
| Interests | communities, distributed innovation, open source, technological innovation, technology strategy, more > |
| Overview | Biography | Publications & Course Materials | Current Research | Areas of Interest |
Karim R. Lakhani is an assistant professor in the Technology and Operations Management Unit at the Harvard Business School. He specializes in the management of technological innovation and product development 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 found and put to use inside for innovation in the biotechnology, life sciences and industrial chemicals industries. He is co-editor of Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software (MIT Press, 2005) and co-founder of the MIT-based Open Source research community and web portal.
Featured Work
MIT Communications Forum, October 4, 2007
For the forum's topic of collective intelligence, Karim Lakhani participated as a speaker in "a conversation about the theory and practice of collective intelligence, with emphasis on Wikipedia, other instances of aggregated intellectual work and on recent innovative applications in business." A podcast and a webcast are available through the forum's website.
Harvard Business School Case on Wikipedia: Wikipedia (A)
by Karim R. Lakhani and Andrew P. McAfee, Harvard Business School Case, January 30, 2007
On August 24, 2006, the "Enterprise 2.0" entry in the Web-based encyclopedia Wikipedia was made a candidate for deletion. Wikipedia was an unusual encyclopedia because virtually anybody could start a new article or edit an existing one. This egalitarian philosophy had enabled very rapid growth but also led to the creation of some articles that did not meet established standards. Wikipedia's "articles-for-deletion" (AfD) process was an attempt to deal with this problem. Anyone could nominate an article for deletion; nomination caused a notice to be placed on the article's page alerting readers to the deletion request and pointing them to a special page where they could debate it. An AfD process lasted five days, after which a Wikipedia administrator reviewed the arguments and made a decision on the fate of the article.
In the spirit of Wikipedia we have released this under a GFDL license, and we will teach it in Andrew McAfee's second year MBA course on Managing in the Information Age this Spring to get students familiar with the inner workings of a distributed community and to grapple with issues related to authority, decision making, expertise and norms of behavior in a community setting.
Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software
Edited by Joseph Feller, Brian Fitzgerald, Scott A. Hissam and Karim R. Lakhani
What is the status of the Free and Open Source Software (F/OSS) revolution? Has the creation of software that can be freely used, modified, and redistributed transformed industry and society, as some predicted, or is this transformation still a work in progress? Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software brings together leading analysts and researchers to address this question, examining specific aspects of F/OSS in a way that is both scientifically rigorous and highly relevant to real-life managerial and technical concerns.