5 Questions with Dr. Karim Lakhani
Liz Moise:
I’m joined by Dr. Karim R. Lakhani, Professor at Harvard Business School. Dr. Lakhani, thanks for taking the time to speak with us. You’ve watched InnoCentive grow for quite a few years now. I’m sure our Solvers may be familiar with your research study, published a few years back. Could you tell me in a few sentences, what your conclusions were on InnoCentive, in that study?
Dr. Karim Lakhani:
I worked with Lars Bo Jeppesen from the Copenhagen Business School along with InnoCentive staff to understand the effectiveness of the problem solving process at InnoCentive.
Most problem solving involves effort by the problem holder to search for the relevant knowledge that will help create an effective and workable solution. However, many studies have shown that this search for knowledge is quite “local,” i.e. problem holders only access knowledge that they are familiar with and rarely do they go outside of their fixed views of the problem or personal knowledge bases. With InnoCentive – the problem holder is actually doing a “broadcast search,” i.e. they broadcast their solution requirements to the whole world – with the hopes of finding someone that has the relevant knowledge that can help create the solution. The problem holder goes from being a problem Solver to a solution seeker.