Publications

SSRN

Article

Exploring the Duality Between Product and Organizational Architectures: A Test of the 'Mirroring' Hypothesis

By: Alan MacCormack, Carliss Y. Baldwin and John Rusnak

A variety of academic studies argue that a relationship exists between the structure of an organization and the design of the products that the organization produces. Specifically, products tend to "mirror" the architectures of the organizations in which they are... View Details

Keywords: Organization Design; Architecture; Modularity; Open Source Software; Communication; Design; Governance; Management Practices and Processes; Open Source Distribution; Product Design; Mission and Purpose; Organizational Structure; Performance; Problems and Challenges; Behavior; Software

2024
Working Paper

Generative AI and the Nature of Work

By: Manuel Hoffmann, Sam Boysel, Frank Nagle, Sida Peng and Kevin Xu

Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) technology demonstrate considerable potential to complement human capital intensive activities. While an emerging literature documents wide-ranging productivity effects of AI, relatively little attention has been paid... View Details

Keywords: Generative Ai; Digital Work; Open Source Software; Knowledge Economy; AI and Machine Learning; Open Source Distribution; Organizational Structure; Performance Productivity; Labor

SSRN

October 2020
Case

PraDigi Open Learning: Transforming Rural India

By: John J-H Kim and Malini Sen

Pratham is a non-governmental organization, focusing on high-quality, low-cost and replicable interventions to address gaps in the Indian education system. Co-founder Madhav Chavan is interested in using technology for education but differed in the way it is used in... View Details

Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Social Entrepreneurship; Education; Information Technology; Learning; Growth and Development Strategy; Non-Governmental Organizations; Social Issues; Education Industry; India; Asia

Educators

Purchase

May 2014
Article

Digital Dark Matter and the Economic Contribution of Apache

By: Shane Greenstein and Frank Nagle

Researchers have long hypothesized that research outputs from government, university, and private company R&D contribute to economic growth, but these contributions may be difficult to measure when they take a non-pecuniary form. The growth of networking devices and... View Details

Keywords: Open Source; Apache; Economic Measurement; Digital Economics; Measurement and Metrics; Open Source Distribution; Internet and the Web; Information Technology; Applications and Software; Economic Growth; Research and Development; Web Services Industry; Information Technology Industry; United States

07 Feb 2007
Working Paper Summaries

The Value of Openness in Scientific Problem Solving

Keywords: by Karim R. Lakhani, Lars Bo Jeppesen, Peter A. Lohse & Jill A. Panetta

2023
Working Paper

Incentivizing Innovation in Open Source: Evidence from the GitHub Sponsors Program

By: Annamaria Conti, Vansh Gupta, Jorge Guzman and Maria P. Roche

Open source is key to innovation, but we know little about how to incentivize it. In this paper, we examine the impact of a program providing monetary incentives to motivate innovators to contribute to open source. The Sponsors program was introduced by GitHub in... View Details

Keywords: Open Source Distribution; Innovation and Invention; Motivation and Incentives; Technology Industry

2024
Working Paper

Open Devices and Slices: Evidence from Wi-Fi Equipment

By: Do Yoon Kim, Roberto Fontana and Shane Greenstein

Prior studies suggest that openness shapes the introduction of new products. This study collects novel data on all routers and subcomponents introduced between 2000 and 2018. We characterize each firm's position in a supply chain as upstream component providers... View Details

Keywords: Open Source Distribution; Product Development; Supply Chain

06 Jun 2005
Research & Ideas

Microsoft vs. Open Source: Who Will Win?

Want to get a heated debate going among technologists? Ask them this question: Can the open source software movement defeat (or severely cripple) Microsoft in the marketplace? With little academic attention... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Technology

Article

Experiments in Open Innovation at Harvard Medical School

By: Eva C. Guinan, Kevin J. Boudreau and Karim R. Lakhani

Harvard Medical School seems an unlikely organization to open up its innovation process. By most measures, the more than 20,000 faculty, research staff and graduate students affiliated with Harvard Medical School are already world class and at the top of the medical... View Details

Keywords: Health Disorders; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Boston

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... View Details

2016
Book

Revolutionizing Innovation: Users, Communities, and Open Innovation

By: Dietmar Harhoff and Karim R. Lakhani

The last two decades have witnessed an extraordinary growth of new models of managing and organizing the innovation process, which emphasize users over producers. Large parts of the knowledge economy now routinely rely on users, communities, and open innovation... View Details

Keywords: Innovation and Management; Transformation; Collaborative Innovation and Invention

Purchase

18 Apr 2019
Research & Ideas

Open Innovation Contestants Build AI-Based Cancer Tool

electronic health records. Lagace: Looking to the future, what other challenges, medical or otherwise, could open source innovation help with? LISH team: LISH has collaborated with elite scientific... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace; Health; Medical Devices & Supplies

01 Jun 2005
News

Christensen Center: Open for Business

approaches for opening and structuring the classes as well as techniques for handling classroom challenges. While case teaching is definitely an art, there are many technical aspects that can be taught, and that is one of the goals of the... View Details

Keywords: Chris Christensen; Christensen Center; case teaching; Colleges, Universities, and Professional Schools; Educational Services

July 13, 2023
Article

Threads Foreshadows a Big—and Surprising—Shift in Social Media

By: Scott Duke Kominers and Liang Wu

Threads, Meta’s Twitter competitor, has become the fastest downloaded app in history. One of the reasons for this is because it allows users to port over their profiles and follows from the already popular social media platform Instagram, also owned by Meta—a feature... View Details

Keywords: Decentralization; Twitter; Facebook; Instagram; Crypto Economy; Blockchain; Network; Industrial Organization; Competition; Open Innovation; Open Platforms; Open Source Innovation; Social Networks; Social Media; Applications and Software; Information Technology Industry

Register to Read

2011
Working Paper

The Contingent Effect of Absorptive Capacity: An Open Innovation Analysis

By: Andrew A. King and Karim R. Lakhani

Technological advancement and innovation requires the integration of both external knowledge and internal inventiveness. In this paper, we unpack the concept of absorptive capacity and separately explore the effect of different types of prior experience on the capacity... View Details

Keywords: Experience and Expertise; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Technological Innovation; Knowledge Use and Leverage; Performance Capacity; Technology Adoption

SSRN

September 2, 2021
Article

The Digital Economy Runs on Open Source. Here's How to Protect It.

By: Hila Lifshitz-Assaf and Frank Nagle

Free and open source software (FOSS) is essential to much of the tech we use every day—from cars to phones to planes to the cloud. While traditionally, it was developed by an army of volunteer developers and given away for free, companies are increasingly taking a more... View Details

Keywords: Free And Open-source Software; FOSS; Open Source Distribution; Applications and Software; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Organizations; Policy; Cybersecurity

Register to Read

September 1989
Article

Dainiji Ryuutsuu Kakumei go Hiraku Seikatsu Taikoku e no Michi (The Second Distribution Revolution Will Open the Way to a Mega-Nation of Good Living)

By: Hirotaka Takeuchi

Keywords: Distribution

Research Summary

Selection, Reallocation, and Spillover: Identifying the Sources of Gains from Multinational Production (with Maggie Chen)

By: Laura Alfaro

Quantifying the gains from multinational production has been a vital topic of economic research. Positive productivity gains are often attributed to knowledge spillover from multinational to domestic firms. An alternative, less stressed explanation is firm selection... View Details

Keywords: Gains From Multinational Production; Firm Selection; Knowledge Spillover

2016
Article

The Mirroring Hypothesis: Theory, Evidence, and Exceptions

By: Lyra J. Colfer and Carliss Y. Baldwin

The mirroring hypothesis predicts that organizational ties within a project, firm, or group of firms (e.g., communication, collocation, employment) will correspond to the technical dependencies in the work being performed. This article presents a unified picture of... View Details

Keywords: Modularity; Mirroring Hypothesis; Organization Design; Conway's Law; Knowledge Boundaries; Relational Contracts; Open Source Software; Organizational Design; Organizational Structure; Boundaries; Knowledge Management; Applications and Software