Karim R. Lakhani is the Dorothy and Michael Hintze Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. He is founder and co-director of the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard, the principal investigator of the NASA Tournament Laboratory at the Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science, faculty co-founder of the Harvard Business School Digital Initiative, and co-founder and co-chair of the Harvard Business Analytics Program.
He specializes in technology management and innovation. His research examines crowd-based innovation models and the role of analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) in the digital transformation of business and operating models. Karim is known for his pioneering scholarship on how communities and contests can be designed and managed to achieve innovative outcomes. He has partnered with NASA, Topcoder, Harvard Medical School, the Broad Institute and Linux Foundation to conduct field experiments on the design of crowd innovation programs. He serves on the Board of Directors of Mozilla Corporation, Local Motors and advisor to several AI-based startups including StormForge and VideaHealth
Karim was awarded a Ph.D. in management and an SM degree in technology and policy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering and Management from McMaster University. Prior to coming to HBS he served as a Lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. Karim has published over 150 papers and teaching cases, is the co-editor of Revolutionizing Innovation: Users, Communities and Open Innovation (2016) and Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software (2005). He is the co-author of the book Competing in the Age of AI (2020).
