Karim R. Lakhani’s Infrequent Musings

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Face it, you just love 80’s Music. Your iPod is filled with oldies like Depche Mode, New Order and Duran Duran. Or music from whatever decade you went to university as an undergrad - that era’s music sticks with you forever and it is tough right now to get excited about the latest bling bling krunk hip hop. Well Robert Sapolsky - Professor of Neurology and Neurological Sciences at Stanford University has thought about the same thing. And being the certified genius that he is - came up with a study to figure out why this is so. He wrote about in 1998 in the New Yorker and then had it publised as an essay in his excellent new book called Monkeyluv.

Finally there is now a interview with him - just on this topic. Robert Krulwich from NPR had a wonderfull conversation with him about this topic. It ranges from Music to Sushi to Piercing. I won’t tell you the punch line but do listen, enjoy and wonder.

Oh yeah - what new music have you listened to lately?

So strange to be called von Lakhani. Currently I am visiting Professor Doktor Nik Franke at the Institut für Entrepreneurship und Innovation located in the Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien (Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration). Its been a fun week of research discussions and conversations with Nik and his very talented staff of PhD and Habilitation students.

Yesterday Nik and I did an interivew with a reporter from “Der Standard.” Austria’s leading business news paper. They ran a story about my visit and our work in today’s newspaper.

Thus the honorific title von Lakhani!

The New York Times is running a breathless story about how

Google assembles the majority of the hardware it uses and deploys at such a large scale, that Google may be ‘the world’s fourth-largest maker of computer servers, after Dell, Hewlett-Packard and I.B.M

Users as innovators? Who would have thunk it? Actually Eric von Hippel, my thesis advisor, was the first scholar to point out that a majority of the functionally novel innovations arrive from users. His books “The Source of Innovation” and “Democratizing Innovation” (both available as free downloads) outline the basic thesis of users as innovators and and provide empirical data to show this effect.

NanoSummary: Users can be innovators because they directly experience the use environment with existing products and find them to be lacking in critical functionality. The decision then is to build or buy. Often times the buy option is simply not there because manufacturers do not experience the same use environment and it takes a long time for them to recognize the “need.” Many advanced users cannot wait for the manufacturers to build something they do not understand or for marketing departments to agree that their need can serve the mass market. Thus they innovate. Its really that simple.

Some of the user innovations at work at Google:

Mr. Page designed the initial Google servers, with the assumption that parts would fail on a regular basis. At first he tried to simplify assembly — and reduce the presumed repair time — by not fastening components to the servers at all but simply laying them on a bed of cork. This proved to be unstable, and so parts were connected with Velcro.

“Nobody builds servers as unreliably as we do,” Mr. Hölzle said in a speech last year at CERN, the Swiss particle physics institute. Google is reducing cost while maintaining performance by shifting the burden of reliability from hardware to software — individual hardware components can fail, but software automatically shifts the local task and the data to other machines.

For example, Google designed a software system it calls the Google File System that keeps copies of data in several places so Google does not have to worry when one of its cheap servers fails. This approach also means that it does not have to make regular backup copies of its data as other companies do.

Another system, called the Google Work Queue, allows a big pool of servers to be assigned to various tasks as needed and reassigned to other projects later. This concept, called “virtualization,” has become a trend among large data center operators, which also want to reduce the expense of having separate servers dedicated to each system. But most companies buy commercial software to track which computers are doing what, a complex process.

Google, with its huge computing infrastructure (last I heard it was > 500,000 servers) and the ginormous amounts of hits per days, is experiencing problems that no common server farm provider or manufacturer of software or hardware is facing. Thus the company has to innovate itself and solve those problems or fall behind. Its clear that Google has decided to innovate. A radical example in the article:

Beyond servers, there are signs that Google is now designing its own microchips. The company has hired many of the engineers responsible for the Digital Equipment Corporation’s well-regarded Alpha chip.

“Google’s next step is to build high-performance silicon,” said Mark Stahlman, an independent technology analyst.

Mr. Hölzle said Google had considered custom semiconductor design, but he declined to say if the company had built any. He said that, in general, Google did not want to build anything from scratch if it could buy something that was just as good.

But he added that Google continued to believe that its approach to designing its own cheap and fast computer networks gave it an edge.

“Having lots of relatively unreliable machines and turning them into a reliable service is a hard problem,” Mr. Hölzle said. “That is what we have been doing for a while.”

Viva user innovation!

Do check out this site that I run with Eric von Hippel on the scholarly aspects of user innovation.

Some of you may know that for the past 3 months I have been engaged in an academic job search. MIT Sloan in all its wisdom does not hire its own students and thus we are sent out into the academic wilds to forage for ourselves. Just as I was starting the interview process I came across this wisdom in a fortune cookie:

The taste of patience is bitter but the reward is sweet.

Well sweet it is! As of July 2006 - I will be moving up the river Charles and across to Boston. I am joining the Technology and Operations Management Unit of Harvard Business School as an assistant professor. I will be teaching the core Technology and Operations Management course to Harvard MBAs and continuing my research on distributed innovation systems.

Overall I applied to 7 schools and had 4 invitations for job interviews. The interview entailed about 8 to 10, 30 min meetings with faculty members and a 90 minute seminar on my research. The day of the job talk at the various schools ended up being quite intense. However I found the faculty at each of the schools (Wharton, HBS, NYU-IS, UC Berkeley SIMS) to be amazingly nice and very receptive to my research. The feedback in the seminars was also quite good and very constructive. In the end I was very glad to have a few options in front of me.

It feels great to be done! Phew!

News Flash! Lego has finally discovered that users can innovate! Chris Anderson wonders when they will be teaching about this in B-Schools? How about in less than 4 weeks!!! Well I am teaching two courses at Sloan on innovation and entrepreneurship and these peer production models are going to get a prominent showing. Chris if you are visiting Boston this Spring you are welcome to guest lecture in my class!

As some of you may know, I have been an active student and researcher of the Free/Open Source Software movements since 1998. Ever since I first encountered Linux, Apache and Perl in a bio-informatics lab at MIT - I have been intrigued by the “effortless” collaboration and cooperation behind the creation of open source products. Having seen the difficulties of product development inside of a large company - I was simply floored that such high quality products could be created in a community like setting. This combined with a course on user-based innovation by Eric von Hippel caused me to change my research direction and to foucs exclusively on models of distributed innovation as exemplified by the open source community. I can still clearly remember the day in July 1998 when Eric finally convinced me to drop bioinformatics in favour of studying open source. Many of my chums and colleagues shook their heads and said that I was chasing a fad. Well we now know better.

Most of my research has focussed on understanding the why and how of open source. Why it works the way it works and why it makes economic and organizational sense? So I was pleasantly surprised when Mitchell Baker from the Mozilla Foundation asked me to serve on an advisory committee to its Board to help determine the relationship between the Foundation and a new wholy owned, “taxable” subsidary. While Mozilla, its ancestors and its progeny have been well known for technical innovation. Very few have considered the social and organizational innovation done by the dedicated people working on the project. Keeping the Internet open for innovation has been their mantra and it can only be done if there is both good code AND good organzing ability. Starting with the landmark release of the source code from Netscape to the formation of Mozilla Foundation - the social innovations and adaptations to allow the evolution of a large scale code base to move from a proprietary company to a community have been remarkable. So the opportunity to participate in the discussion and advise around creating a new subsidary for the Foundation was a an opportunity that I just could not pass up, even though I have taken a vow of silence during my dissertation writing!

Here is why this so interesting from an organizational innovation perspective:
1) The technology world tends to be a battle between firms. Company “I” will go against Company “H”, Company “M” and Company “S” for technical and commercial supremacy. Firms know how to compete against one another. And certainly in the software world - Microsoft has shown repeatedly (1,2) how to defeat other competitors. But how does a company fight a community? Can it even do that? How does a company fight a not-for-profit foundation? Imagine Salvation Army Thrift Stores fighting and taking significant market share from Walmart. Imagine your friendly neighborhood Opera comany taking global market share away from Disney. It simply does not happen at any level of significance. However, the open source model has shown that community-based effort can and do win against commerical competitors. Even more interesting communities can cause commercial companies to make significant changes in strategy (E.g.: IBM and Sun embracing open source) based on their technical and market performance. That is why the new Mozilla Corporation is going to be such an interesting animal in the corporate jungle. On the one hand it will be a software development house - but on the other hand - its purpose is to promote innovation and openess on the internet by advancing the goals of its parent. I can just imagine the head scratching and shaking going on inside of companies trying to make sense of how to compete. The Foundation will no longer have to rely on charity for accomplishing its mission. Instead it now has the ability to generate significant resources and to actively promote its mission. Very cool!

2) The Foundation will now face a very new challenge of both running a company and also working with the community and an eco-system of value added developers. I have mapped out below the complex ecology. It is a non-trivial task but something that if done right will create a brand new model for organizing open source projects from a community perspective.

I firmly believe that this is not or should ever become something like a MySQL or JBoss type endeavour. Instead this a corporation with a public benefit misssion. Not a corporation with a profit mission. Profits matter a lot and will enable the corporation to serve its goals - but it is not the reason for its existence. It has to compete head on with Microsoft and Opera - but it cannot do it at the expense of promoting openness and innovation on the Internet. Running the corporation will not be any easy task but a an experiment well worth doing.

Finally I think this move has significant implications for social movements that care about changing the world at large. Most social movements are based on protest and boycotts. The means of fighting back against corporate and governmental institutions have always been to apply popular pressure on them. Open source communities have shown, that instead of protest, a focus on building alternative viable solutions can have much lasting and permanent impact. Building solutions that direclty compete in the marketplace puts pressure on firms in a way that boycotts and demonstration never can. Imagine if the living wage campaign, instead of just boycotting Nike, had formed an alternative company, lets call it Mikey!, producing hip athletic shoes and clothing made by fairly paid developing country workers. Imagine if they had created their own catchy slogans and gained significant market share against Nike. Imagine if the environmental movement had funded and created viable alternative sources of energy instead of merely protesting greenhouse gasses and nuclear power. Imagine the creation of GreenCar corporation manufacturing and selling hydrogen powered cars or ConSolar/Wind selling solar and wind generated electricity. Few social movements move beyond the repertoire of protest, disruption, violence, boycotts and show of solidarity in large numbers to the creation of whole, sustainable, alternative solutions in agreement with their concerns and grievances. This move by Mozilla Foundation is a further step in the right direction of social responsibility, profitability and community purpose.

I am sure I will blog more about this…but for now I am going back to my dissertation writing.

At long last! A book I have been co-editing on open source has come out:

All of you need to buy a few copies for your selves, your families and your friends! Oh yeah don’t forget your co-workers!

Ok now back to my vow of silence as I try to slay the beasts of dissertatia!

Non-hackers are still puzzled by the motivation question about open source. Why oh why are these guys doing this. Frankly I am actually kind of tired of this question. It is kind of non-interesting. For me I really care about figuring out what happens once these guys start to collaborate together - how do they do it? What makes it work?

If you must know the answer to the motivation question you can read my paper on it or look at a presentation about it.

Still don’t believe me - well how about this true life example of the Hacker Ethic. Ron Avitzur and his friend worked for free and on the down low for months at Apple - an EIGHT BILLION - corporation. His motivations:

Why did Greg and I do something so ludicrous as sneaking into an eight-billion-dollar corporation to do volunteer work? Apple was having financial troubles then, so we joked that we were volunteering for a nonprofit organization. In reality, our motivation was complex. Partly, the PowerPC was an awesome machine, and we wanted to show off what could be done with it; in the Spinal Tap idiom, we said, “OK, this one goes to eleven.” Partly, we were thinking of the storytelling value. Partly, it was a macho computer guy thing - we had never shipped a million copies of software before. Mostly, Greg and I felt that creating quality educational software was a public service. We were doing it to help kids learn math. Public schools are too poor to buy software, so the most effective way to deliver it is to install it at the factory.

Beyond this lies another set of questions, both psychological and political. Was I doing this out of bitterness that my project had been canceled? Was I subversively coopting the resources of a multinational corporation for my own ends? Or was I naive, manipulated by the system into working incredibly hard for its benefit? Was I a loose cannon, driven by arrogance and ego, or was I just devoted to furthering the cause of education?

I view the events as an experiment in subverting power structures. I had none of the traditional power over others that is inherent to the structure of corporations and bureaucracies. I had neither budget nor headcount. I answered to no one, and no one had to do anything I asked. Dozens of people collaborated spontaneously, motivated by loyalty, friendship, or the love of craftsmanship. We were hackers, creating something for the sheer joy of making it work.

Now do you believe me?

Robert Grudin writes in “Time and the Art of Living”:
IX.12 The difference between competence and incompetence is no greater than the difference between mere competence and achievement. Real achievement, which augments the sum of human worth and knowledge, is seldom born of a conventional understanding; it is always a shock to the competent who, usually middle-aged, defensive and unprepared for new exertions, depends on the status quo and have come to accept it as representing the limits of the known universe. Achievement often stirkes such people with an aversion that is almost chemical, producing in them a giddy fear of chaos. Thier response is generally one of sharp challenge, ringing with probity and harboring the threat of ostracism. Thus every achiever is, at leat temporarily, a kind of minor trajic hero, punished for his contribution, he must with good cheer endure the itnerval between impact and absorption.