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Show Results For
- All HBS Web
(208)
- News (45)
- Research (136)
- Events (4)
- Multimedia (3)
- Faculty Publications (84)
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- 2019
- Working Paper
Using Technology to Augment Professionals, Instead of Replacing Them, for Innovative Problem Solving
By: Hila Lifshitz - Assaf, Felicia Ng, Aniket Kittur and Robert Kraut
While in some technological and scientific areas innovation is flourishing, in others it is stalling, leaving important problems unsolved for decades. One explanation is professionals’ limitations as problem solvers, as accumulating depth of knowledge enhances one’s... View Details
- September 2019 (Revised September 2020)
- Case
SOFWERX: Innovation at U.S. Special Operations Command (Abridged)
By: Herman Leonard, Mitch Weiss, Jin Hyun Paik and Kerry Herman
James "Hondo" Geurts, the Acquisition Executive for U.S. Special Operations Command was in the middle of his Senate confirmation hearing in 2017 to become Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development and Acquisition. Overseeing acquisitions in one of the... View Details
Keywords: Open Innovation; Crowdsourcing; Prototyping; Navy; Entrepreneurship; Public Equity; Innovation and Invention; Innovation Leadership; Acquisition; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Public Administration Industry; United States
Leonard, Herman, Mitch Weiss, Jin Hyun Paik, and Kerry Herman. "SOFWERX: Innovation at U.S. Special Operations Command (Abridged)." Harvard Business School Case 820-047, September 2019. (Revised September 2020.)
- Article
Scaling Up Analogical Innovation with Crowds and AI
By: Aniket Kittur, Lisa Yu, Tom Hope, Joel Chan, Hila Lifshitz - Assaf, Karni Gilon, Felicia Ng, Robert Kraut and Dafna Shachaf
Analogy—the ability to find and apply deep structural patterns across domains—has been fundamental to human innovation in science and technology. Today there is a growing opportunity to accelerate innovation by moving analogy out of a single person’s mind and... View Details
Keywords: Innovation; Artificial Intelligence; Crowdsourcing; Analogy; Innovation and Invention; Technology; Science
Kittur, Aniket, Lisa Yu, Tom Hope, Joel Chan, Hila Lifshitz - Assaf, Karni Gilon, Felicia Ng, Robert Kraut, and Dafna Shachaf. "Scaling Up Analogical Innovation with Crowds and AI." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116, no. 6 (February 5, 2019): 1870–1877.
- September 2018
- Article
Aggregation of Consumer Ratings: An Application to Yelp.com
By: Weijia Dai, Ginger Jin, Jungmin Lee and Michael Luca
Because consumer reviews leverage the wisdom of the crowd, the way in which they are aggregated is a central decision faced by platforms. We explore this "rating aggregation problem" and offer a structural approach to solving it, allowing for (1) reviewers to vary in... View Details
Keywords: User Generated Content; Crowdsourcing; Yelp; Social and Collaborative Networks; Information; Internet and the Web; Learning; Mathematical Methods; E-commerce
Dai, Weijia, Ginger Jin, Jungmin Lee, and Michael Luca. "Aggregation of Consumer Ratings: An Application to Yelp.com." Quantitative Marketing and Economics 16, no. 3 (September 2018): 289–339.
- April 2020
- Teaching Note
Glossier: Co-Creating a Cult Brand with a Digital Community
By: Jill Avery
Teaching Note for HBS No. 519-022. Flush with cash from its Series C fundraise, cult beauty brand Glossier considers its next phase of growth, facing critical decisions on how to allocate its capital to support various marketing communications and distribution... View Details
Keywords: Digital Marketing; Crowdsourcing; CRM; Startup; Direct-to-consumer; DTC; Marketing; Marketing Strategy; Brands and Branding; Consumer Behavior; Customer Relationship Management; Venture Capital; Business Startups; Entrepreneurship; Social Media; Beauty and Cosmetics Industry; United States
- January 2014 (Revised January 2017)
- Case
Nivea (A)
By: Karim R. Lakhani, Johann Fuller, Volker Bilgram and Greta Friar
The case describes the efforts of Beiersdorf, a worldwide leader in the cosmetics and skin care industries, to generate and commercialize new R&D through open innovation using external crowds and "netnographic" analysis. Beiersdorf, best known for its consumer brand... View Details
Keywords: Innovation; Innovation Management; Crowdsourcing; Big Data; Innovation Strategy; Innovation and Management; Knowledge Management; Knowledge Sharing; Research and Development; Social and Collaborative Networks; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Analytics and Data Science; Beauty and Cosmetics Industry; Consumer Products Industry
Lakhani, Karim R., Johann Fuller, Volker Bilgram, and Greta Friar. "Nivea (A)." Harvard Business School Case 614-042, January 2014. (Revised January 2017.)
- November 2019
- Teaching Note
Hacking Heroin
By: Mitchell Weiss and Sarah Mehta
This teaching note pairs with a case that is used in a course on Public Entrepreneurship, for a first module on "ideas." The case is designed to help students work through the question: where do new ideas to stubborn problems come from? And, in particular, the question... View Details
- March 2014 (Revised January 2015)
- Case
Prodigy Network: Democratizing Real Estate Design and Financing
By: Karim R. Lakhani, Katja Hutter and Greta Friar
This case follows Rodrigo Nino, founder and CEO of commercial real estate development company Prodigy Network, as he develops an equity-based crowdfunding model for small investors to access commercial real estate in Colombia, then tries out the model in the U.S. U.S.... View Details
Keywords: Innovation; Real Estate; Crowdfunding; Crowdsourcing; Digital Innovation; Commercial Real Estate; Online Platforms; Disruption; Transformation; Design; Assets; Equity; Disruptive Innovation; Innovation Strategy; Internet and the Web; Digital Platforms; Real Estate Industry; Latin America; New York (state, US); United States
Lakhani, Karim R., Katja Hutter, and Greta Friar. "Prodigy Network: Democratizing Real Estate Design and Financing." Harvard Business School Case 614-064, March 2014. (Revised January 2015.)
- 2024
- Working Paper
The Crowdless Future? Generative AI and Creative Problem Solving
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... View Details
Keywords: Large Language Models; Crowdsourcing; Generative Ai; Creative Problem-solving; Organizational Search; AI-in-the-loop; Prompt Engineering; AI and Machine Learning; Innovation and Invention
Boussioux, Léonard, Jacqueline N. Lane, Miaomiao Zhang, Vladimir Jacimovic, and Karim R. Lakhani. "The Crowdless Future? Generative AI and Creative Problem Solving." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 24-005, July 2023. (Revised July 2024.)
- August 2017
- Case
Hacking Heroin
By: Mitchell Weiss and Sarah Mehta
"Hacking Heroin" was the first hackathon that Annie Rittgers, founder of Cincinnati-based 17a, had organized or even attended. "There will continue to be a lot of preventable overdose deaths and wasted potential if the opioid crisis continues unabated," she said.... View Details
Keywords: Public Entrepreneurship; Hackathon; Heroin; Opioids; Crowdsourcing; Public Sector; Entrepreneurship; Innovation and Invention; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Health Pandemics; Public Administration Industry; Health Industry; Ohio; Cincinnati
Weiss, Mitchell, and Sarah Mehta. "Hacking Heroin." Harvard Business School Case 818-010, August 2017.
- Article
Firms, Crowds, and Innovation
By: Teppo Felin, Karim R. Lakhani and Michael L. Tushman
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... View Details
Keywords: Crowdsourcing; Innovation; Open Innovation; Organization Theory; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Organizations; Theory; Strategy
Felin, Teppo, Karim R. Lakhani, and Michael L. Tushman. "Firms, Crowds, and Innovation." Special Issue on Organizing Crowds and Innovation. Strategic Organization 15, no. 2 (May 2017): 119–140.
- 2019
- Working Paper
Breaking and Reconfiguring the Boundaries Between Domain Experts and Crowds to Solve Complex R&D Problems through Partial Decomposition
By: Hila Lifshitz - Assaf and Zoe Szajnfarber
The need for domain experts is all but universally assumed when organizing for scientific and technological innovation. In contrast, we are witnessing a burgeoning of citizen science, crowdsourcing, and other “open” methods based on the opposite assumption that crowds... View Details
- April 2024
- Article
Decision Authority and the Returns to Algorithms
By: Hyunjin Kim, Edward L. Glaeser, Andrew Hillis, Scott Duke Kominers and Michael Luca
We evaluate a pilot in an Inspections Department to explore the returns to a pair of algorithms that varied in their sophistication. We find that both algorithms provided substantial prediction gains, suggesting that even simple data may be helpful. However, these... View Details
Keywords: Algorithmic Aversion; Algorithmic Decision Making; Algorithms; Public Entrepreneurship; Govenment; Local Government; Crowdsourcing; Crowdsourcing Contests; Inspection; Principal-agent Theory; Government Administration; Decision Making; Public Administration Industry; United States
Kim, Hyunjin, Edward L. Glaeser, Andrew Hillis, Scott Duke Kominers, and Michael Luca. "Decision Authority and the Returns to Algorithms." Strategic Management Journal 45, no. 4 (April 2024): 619–648.
- August 2021
- Article
Information Seeding and Knowledge Production in Online Communities: Evidence from OpenStreetMap
By: Abhishek Nagaraj
The wild success of a few online communities (like Wikipedia) has obscured the fact that most attempts at forming such communities fail. This study evaluates information seeding, an early-stage intervention to bootstrap online communities that enables contributors to... View Details
Keywords: Online Communities; Knowledge Production; Crowdsourcing; Innovation; Digitization; Internet and the Web; Digital Platforms; Social and Collaborative Networks; Analytics and Data Science; Knowledge Dissemination
Nagaraj, Abhishek. "Information Seeding and Knowledge Production in Online Communities: Evidence from OpenStreetMap." Management Science 67, no. 8 (August 2021).
- 2016
- Working Paper
Markets for Ideas: Prize Structure, Entry Limits, and the Design of Ideation Contests
By: Pavel Kireyev
Contests are a popular mechanism for the procurement of innovation. In marketing, design, and other creative industries, firms use freelance marketplaces to organize contests and obtain high-quality ideas for ads, new products, and even business strategies from... View Details
Keywords: Idea Generation; Crowdsourcing; Contest Design; Structural Estimation; Motivation and Incentives; Competition; Innovation and Invention
Kireyev, Pavel. "Markets for Ideas: Prize Structure, Entry Limits, and the Design of Ideation Contests." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 16-129, May 2016.
- May 2017 (Revised October 2017)
- Case
Hyperloop Transportation Technologies: Building Breakthrough Innovations in Crowd-Powered Ecosystems
By: Lynda M. Applegate, Terri L. Griffith and Ann Majchrzak
Dirk Ahlborn, co-founder and CEO of Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, Inc. (HTT) looks back at the evolving organizational design and community that allows HTT to be crowd-powered. Since the founding in 2013, HTT has dealt with building an organization with less... View Details
Keywords: Collaboration; Crowdsourcing; Entrepreneurial Finance; Innovation; Organizational Design; Startups; Business Startups; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Entrepreneurship; Finance; Product Development
Applegate, Lynda M., Terri L. Griffith, and Ann Majchrzak. "Hyperloop Transportation Technologies: Building Breakthrough Innovations in Crowd-Powered Ecosystems." Harvard Business School Case 817-134, May 2017. (Revised October 2017.)
- May 2017
- Other Article
Stepwise Distributed Open Innovation Contests for Software Development: Acceleration of Genome-Wide Association Analysis
By: Andrew Hill, Po-Ru Loh, Ragu B. Bharadwaj, Pascal Pons, Jingbo Shang, Eva C. Guinan, Karim R. Lakhani, Iain Kilty and Scott Jelinsky
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.... View Details
Keywords: Crowdsourcing; Genome-wide Association Study; Logistic Regression; Open Innovation; PLINK; Collaborative Innovation and Invention
Hill, Andrew, Po-Ru Loh, Ragu B. Bharadwaj, Pascal Pons, Jingbo Shang, Eva C. Guinan, Karim R. Lakhani, Iain Kilty, and Scott Jelinsky. "Stepwise Distributed Open Innovation Contests for Software Development: Acceleration of Genome-Wide Association Analysis." GigaScience 6, no. 5 (May 2017).
- August 2018
- Background Note
Note on Hackathons
By: Ethan Bernstein
Organizations have often sought to meet the pressures of rapid change through novel ways of managing human capital to boost innovation and productivity. Hackathons have emerged as one of the latest approaches to do just that. How can those responsible for managing... View Details
Keywords: Hackathon; Crowdsourcing; Hack; Innovation; Productivity; Minimum Viable Product; Time; Transparency; Bootcamp; Design; Entrepreneurship; Human Resources; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Innovation and Management; Management; Organizational Structure; Performance Productivity; Technology; Technology Industry
Bernstein, Ethan. "Note on Hackathons." Harvard Business School Background Note 419-021, August 2018.
- January 2019 (Revised October 2019)
- Case
Glossier: Co-Creating a Cult Brand with a Digital Community
By: Jill Avery
Glossier’s proclaimed strategy was “born from content; fueled by community.” The digital-first, direct-to-consumer beauty brand had experienced rapid growth, with sales up 600% in 2017 and a customer portfolio that grew by threefold. But, its founder, Emily Weiss, was... View Details
Keywords: Brands; Brand Management; Brand Communication; Retailing; DTC; Influencer; Startup; Internet Marketing; Big Data; Crowdsourcing; Growth and Development Strategy; Social Media; E-commerce; Internet and the Web; Digital Marketing; Consumer Products Industry; Beauty and Cosmetics Industry; Retail Industry; United States; North America
Avery, Jill. "Glossier: Co-Creating a Cult Brand with a Digital Community." Harvard Business School Case 519-022, January 2019. (Revised October 2019.)
- October 2017
- Case
Quantopian: A New Model for Active Management
Keywords: Big Data; Hedge Fund; Crowdsourcing; Investment Fund; Quantitative Hedge Fun; Algorithmic Data; Analytics and Data Science
Fleiss, Sara, Adi Sunderam, Luis M. Viceira, and Caitlin Carmichael. "Quantopian: A New Model for Active Management." Harvard Business School Case 218-046, October 2017.