Karim R. Lakhani’s Infrequent Musings

Harbus, the HBS student newspaper, is reporting on a sekret investigation of the TOM RC (required curriculum) faculty as we were discussing today’s midterm. The headline:

Sky Falls As Tom Midterm Approaches

RCs Seen Wallowing in Pool of Hate and Self-Loathing as TOM Faculty Crack Out the Champagne

All I can say is that the caviar in our private dining room in the faculty club was quite yummy. As for the exam - well we will know soon enough if the cracking sound I heard during the exam was that of a student or a Benihana chopstick.

I was really pleased but not at all surprised to hear that Saul Griffith, MIT Media Lab alum, was awarded one of the 2007 MacArthur “Genius” Fellowships. It could not have happened to a nicer and smarter surfer dude.  I got to know Saul as a grad student at MIT and take some micro-credit for improvements in his love life.  Saul represents the ideal hacker spirit at MIT and actually enacted the principles of distributed innovation that I studied in my dissertation. If you want to track the future of distributed innovation and how to work with communities - keep an eye on Saul.

Tim O’Reilly, future father-in-law of Saul, has a very nice write up about him and his accomplishments.
Way to go Saul!  I knew you when…

This picture shows the faces behind the Linux Kernel.  Really great to put faces to names and realize that this indeed is a distributed community. You can see Linus Torvalds in the Center.

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal had a front page story about the fledgling class of entrepreneurs in Pakistan trying to reconcile modernity and religiosity. Sometimes orthodoxy has to be turned on its head. Here is a short blurb from the article:

A new class of entrepreneurs is emerging who, in small but significant ways, have challenged the religious orthodoxy. They provide a stark counterpoint to the rising Islamic radicalism that the U.S. and others view as a threat to Pakistan’s position as a staunch Western ally. And with many importing ideas from abroad, they are contributing to Pakistan’s 21st-century search for itself.

“Can you be modern and Muslim? How is Pakistan going to link into the global economy?” asks Ali Cheema, an economics professor at Lahore University of Management Sciences, who has researched Pakistan’s entrepreneurs. “These people are posing important questions.”

By sheer demographic weight, the younger generation will determine Pakistan’s direction. Of its 160 million people, 100 million are under the age of 25. Many are rural, poor and unprepared for a role in the global economy. But fast economic growth has also drawn more men and women to the cities, propelling some up the income ladder through education and new jobs.

On a recent summer afternoon, clerics from a Muslim seminary here walked across the street to a new boutique, which purports to be the first couture store in Islamabad. The bearded men, clad in white cotton tunics and trousers, were patrolling the neighborhood for signs of moral laxity. Upon entering the store, they walked over to a rack of slinky shirts.

“Our women don’t wear such clothes,” declared one of the visitors.

“You’re right,” replied Yasser Anees, the boutique’s 26-year-old co-owner. “Those are for men.” The patrol soon departed.

Yes we have now slipped into Fall.  I begin teaching on this coming Friday 9/7.  A warm welcome to all the incoming students at HBS, especially sections A & D.  We have forty sessions ahead of us in the Technology and Operations Management core class.  We go from Japanese restaurants to cranberry factories to pasta distributors to the Americas Cup and stop at Threadless.  Its going to be quite a ride!

This is a cool experiment in developing teaching materials - many thanks to the “3 J’s” from Threadless for making it happen! Stay tuned…

Seems to me that the above paraphrased quote about Wikipedia describes most of my research work on distributed innovation. I came across this quote while reading an article in the New York Times describing how the Wikipedia community self-organized to create the most current and updated information page on the web on the Virginia Tech massacre. The article outlines how over 2000 people participated in creating the page on Wikipedia - without any formal prior coordination or task assignment. Eric von Hippel and I are in the midst of finishing up a paper that outlines the basics of a micro-distributed innovation system using example from Open Source - but we think it will equally apply to this setting as well. Stay tuned….

Last week I had the pleasure to be on the Kojo Nnamdi show on WAMU (DC’s NPR Station). We had an hour long conversation on distributed and open innovation. Joining me on the air were Jill Panetta from InnoCentive.com, Jacob DeHart from Threadless.com and Nate Boaz from Prize4Life.org. Many thanks to Kojo and to his producer Brendan Sweeney for organizing a great show. I enjoyed my time with them. Download it to your ipod and listen in.

A common reaction after reading an HBS case is: “So what happened? How come there are no conclusions and recommendations?”  Welcome to the world of case-based teaching! A good overview of the case-based teaching method is here. Here are few excerpts about what we tell our new students about case-based teaching: (If there are some MBA 2008 - Section E students reading my blog - instead of their assigned cases - they may also want to pipe in on the comments about the case method and their experience with it):

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, my colleague Andrew McAfee and I just published a Harvard Business School Case on Wikipedia. In the spirit of Wikipedia we have released this under a GFDL license. Andrew and I will teach it in his second year MBA course on Managing in the Information Age this coming April. At HBS, all courses are taught via the case method, which means no lecturing by professors. HBS cases are designed to have a “managerial” decision point - which forces students to choose between several alternatives and come prepared to class to discuss their rationale for their choices. A case discussion is typically 80 minutes long with the goal of having the students engage in discussion with each other and the professor to develop a particular point of view about the case facts. In a case discussion, “there are no RIGHT answers - but there are WRONG answers!” My role as a professor is to make sure that the main teaching points in the case come out via the discussion with the students.

The case aims to get students familiar with the inner workings of a distributed community and to grapple with issues related to authority, decision making, expertise and norms of behavior in a community setting. The MBA curriculum at most business schools does a decent job of exposing students to managerial issues inside of hierarchical organizations. However, there is very little as it pertains to the emerging paradigm of distributed innovation. We just don’t know enough about what it takes to “manage” an innovation community. Can you even manage one? How do you build one? How do you sustain it? What kills a community?

I think there is a lot of wisdom about it in practice, i.e. people that are going about seeding, building and sustaining community and know how difficult it is to build communities. Our hope with this case (and others to come) is to engage our students to think seriously about communities inside and outside of firms and how they themselves can be participants in them.

I welcome your feedback on the case.

Andrew’s blog post about the case is here.

I also posted this on the Future of Communities Blog.

Today’s Wall Street Journal has a nice column by David Wessel on spurring innovation through prizes (Page A6 in the 1/25/2007 print edition). David interviewed me about my research (with Lars Bo Jeppesen, Jill Panetta and Peter Lohse) and my perspectives on different models for innovation and in particular how scientific problem solving can be distributed. (Update: I asked David if he could find a way to release the column on the open - the good folks at WSJ.com were cooperative) The column (unfortunately) is behind WSJ.com’s paywall –> but Here is a link to the column and there is a public forum about it here.

So I am in the middle of grading all the exams. Its hard work! I thought some of you might enjoy this. Enjoy your holidays Section E! While I keep dreaming of Gelatin, NPV assumptions, Art vs Science, and Go/No Go decisions.

Oh man just when I thought this Web 2 OH thing was taking off, in comes Clay Shirky to bring in a dose of reality:

I suspect Second Life is largely a “Try Me” virus, where reports of a strange and wonderful new thing draw the masses to log in and try it, but whose ability to retain anything but a fraction of those users is limited. The pattern of a Try Me virus is a rapid spread of first time users, most of whom drop out quickly, with most of the dropouts becoming immune to later use. Pointcast was a Try Me virus, as was LambdaMOO, the experiment that Second Life most closely resembles.

Comparing it to Pointcast is devastating.  Read more about it here.

Very Short List brings ONE new and cool thing every week day. I am hooked.

Not only am I a consumer of NPR news - but today I made it for 45 seconds as part of the news story as well. Jenny Lawton from Chicago NPR did a story on my favorite online store - threadless.com and she interviewed me about their innovation and community management models. You can hear it here. Kind of fun and silly.

Ben Hyde - always the astute observer of community dynamics - highlights some of the problems that arise in communities.  One of these days we will teach “community management” in Business Schools - until that day arrives it will be mostly folk wisdom that will carry us through.

Here are some essential instructions for any up and coming MBA student….this should also be required at MIT Charm School.

It looks like some of my students have discovered my blog. Welcome to my random musings! Hey do you have time to be reading my blog - now get back to reading your cases! See you in class.

I am very pleased to announce that the fine folks at MIT Press (Bob Prior rocks as an editor!) have now made a “free” version of my coedited volume Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software available online. All the articles are now available for download as PDF. Enjoy. This “best selling” book will be out in paperback as of March 2007. In the meantime I encourage you to buy a copy for yourself and one for everyone of your dear and close friends and relatives

OK, here is a shameless self-promo. Recently I was interviewed by HBS publishing’s Working Knowledge group about my research. Many of you might know about my open source work –> but during my dissertation I also spent quite a bit of time thinking, writing and researching about extensions to the open source model. Many people say that open source is only applicable to software. But in my research I saw practices that could be translated to other industries.

One of the things I had noted in my open source research was this continuous broadcast of problem and solution information to EVERYONE on the email list. This may seem pretty trivial to most open source developers. Projects live and die on email lists - but the power of continual broadcast and the ability of anyone on the list to provide feedback and or actual solutions is quite remarkable. In thinking about this practice of “work broadcasting” - I came across a company called InnoCentive.com –> that did this as its primary business model. InnoCentive works with R&D labs and gets them to broadcast their science problems to a community of (now) over 100,000 scientists around the world. Its a pretty cool model and the analysis showed some very counter-intuitive results. Read about it here. [The paper is in review at a Journal so I can’t yet post it.]

The phenomenon of using open source principles in other settings has also been called Crowd Sourcing (June 2006 Wired article) by Jeff Howe. Jeff has also set up a blog about it if you are interested in tracking it some more.

OK now I must get back to teaching prep!