“With the advent of the Internet, the idea that the organization needs to monopolize people, ideas, and assets has been turned upside down.” Professor Karim Lakhani from Harvard Business School started studying the world of crowdsourcing years ago, when he wanted to determine what motivated people to contribute to open source software projects. Since then, he […]
It may not be at the top of a police department’s org chart, but on the internet, traffic cop is one of the best and most coveted positions there is. There are somewhere around one billion websites at present, with some three billion people accessing them across more connected devices than there are human beings […]
Professor Karim Lakhani, co-chair of the 2016 Open and User Innovation Conference, talks with Matt Tucker about how people outside the traditional boundaries of firms are radically changing the innovation process. Tucker: Thanks for taking the time to talk to me about Revolutionizing Innovation. It’s a new book that you’ve edited with Dietmar Harhoff that […]
Blockchain is one of a handful of technologies poised to transform a multitude of industries, and yet its promise remains relatively unrealized. However, HBS alumnus Yezi Peng (MBA 2017) thinks that the blockchain platform Ethereum might just have the power to usher blockchain into widespread usage.
Written by Mohit Mittal, HBS ’17. This post was originally published on the Digital Initiative’s classroom blogging platform. Introduced as a messaging app in 2011 by Tencent, WeChat has evolved into lifestyle platform for users in China. With ~850 million monthly active users, it now offers to its users what Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger, Venmo, Grubhub, […]
Written by Sonali Bloom, HBS ’17. This post was originally published on the Digital Initiative’s classroom blogging platform. Craigslist grew rapidly by leveraging hyper-local network effects — but now faces market share erosion as other platforms enter niche segments. Who will win, and how?
Written by Yuval Gonczarowski, HBS ’17. This post was originally published on the Digital Initiative’s classroom blogging platform. What started as a place for disgruntled employees to share their frustrations with the people upstairs anonymously, quickly became a money-making machine.
Much fanfare has been made of the promise and potential of the platform economy, predominantly for its flexibility and efficiency, but for workers in the “gig economy,” is it really a reasonable way to earn a living? This is the central question at the heart of Juliet Schor’s (Boston College) research on some of the big six providers: Airbnb, TaskRabbit, Uber, Lyft, Postmates and Favor.
