Karim R. Lakhani is the Lumry Family Associate Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School and the Principal Investigator of the Harvard-NASA Tournament Lab at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science. He specialises 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 organisations 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 organisation can be accessed through innovation contests. Currently Lakhani is investigating incentives and behaviour in contests and the mechanisms behind scientific team formation through field experiments on the TopCoder platform and the Harvard Medical School.
Lakhani holds a PhD in management and an MSc in Technology and Policy from MIT, and a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering and Management from McMaster University.