Karim R. Lakhani


Karim R. Lakhani is a leading technology management and innovation expert and is the Charles E. Wilson Professor of Business Administration and the Dorothy and Michael Hintze Fellow at the Harvard Business School. The founder and co-director of the , he is best known for his pioneering scholarship on crowd-based innovation models, artificial intelligence, and the importance of data and analytics in the digital transformation of companies and industries. In particular, he is known for his research on the T-shirt company Threadless, and prize-based open innovation firms like InnoCentive and Topcoder.
His most recent book, investigates how data, analytics, and AI-driven processes are transforming industries and the nature of work, and how AI-centric organizations are redefining how they create, capture, share, and deliver value. With examples such as Airbnb, Microsoft, and Amazon, the book explores how AI-driven processes are scalable, propel scope increase, enable companies to straddle industries, and drive ever more accurate, complex, and sophisticated predictions which provide a competitive edge.
Lakhani is the principal investigator of the at the , and the faculty co-founder of the .
He has partnered with NASA, Topcoder, and the Harvard Medical School to conduct field experiments on the design of crowd innovation programs. He serves on the Board of Directors of Mozilla and Local Motors.

Education

Lakhani earned a Bachelor in Engineering Management in 1993 at McMaster University, a Master of Science in Technology and Policy in 1999, and a Ph.D. in Management in 2006 at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His Ph.D. dissertation was advised by Eric von Hippel, with Tom Allen and Wanda Orlikowski.

Books

Lakhani is an author or co-author of on technology and innovation.