Karim R. Lakhani (born c. 1970) is the Dorothy & Michael Hintze Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He is the principal investigator of the Crowd Innovation Lab at the Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science. His research and teaching focuses on open innovation and user innovation. Lakhani is the founder and one of the principal investigators of the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard (LISH).

Life and work

Lakhani earned a Bachelor in Engineering Management in 1993 at McMaster University, a Master of Science in Technology and Policy in 1999, and a Ph.D. in Management in 2006 at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His Ph.D. dissertation was advised by Eric von Hippel, with Tom Allen and Wanda Orlikowski. Lakhani edited the book Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software (ISBN 0-262-06246-1) published by MIT Press. In addition to Open Source, Lakhani also studies crowdsourcing. In particular, he is known for his research on the T-shirt company Threadless, and prize-based open innovation firms like InnoCentive & Topcoder.

Selected publications