The "Expertise of the Periphery," a Harvard Business professor weighs in on the crowd
J Jack Unrau interviews Karim Lakhani via telephone on May 14th, 2007
Karim Lakhani is an Assistant Professor at Harvard Business School's Technology and Operations Management Unit. He is a serious scholar of crowdsourcing, trying to build theories of if, how and why it works. In the past he's also written on open source theory and innovation, including articles about Wikipedia and open source science.
J Jack Unrau: The first thing I wanted to ask you was, what got you into the whole idea of studying crowdsourcing?
Karim Lakhani: I've been studying open source communities since '98 and open source is sort of a precursor to the crowdsourcing meme. That interest actually came out of my...both academic interest but also professional experience when I worked at General Electric in medical systems and I discovered that a lot of the innovations that GE was going to "bring to life" - you know the tagline "bringing things to life" - were already done by users. In a new product development/marketing role that I had at GE I just couldn't understand this at all. I guess with all the sort of the wisdom and training I got at both GE and also in undergrad in Engineering and business that seemed kind of counter-intuitive.
When I ended up at MIT to do my Master's degree in Technology and Policy I noticed the same thing where users were developing all the software I was using in my research - you know Linux and Apache and so forth - and it remained a puzzle as to why this would be happening. So I took a course on innovation and management at the Sloan school where Eric Von Hippel sort of talked about user driven innovation. He had shown that in many products that users were the first people to innovate and now what it looked like was not just that users were innovating but they were creating whole new systems and sort of replacing the traditional role of manufacturers in terms of design, build, support and so forth.
So that got me interested in open source communities and I switched my research topics from biomedical into actually open source and distributed innovation kind of work. Specifically in terms of ... one of the things I was doing in my dissertation explicitly was to investigate extensions of the open source model to other settings and I came across InnoCentive. They were taking one core practice of broadcasting your problems to anyone else in the world and getting help from anybody else in the world and I said "Wow! This is exactly like this one narrow practice of open source."
