Creativity & Problem-Solving

Crowdsourcing Memories from the 1947 Partition of British India

Working with the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute at Harvard University, this project aims to collect and analyze oral histories and memories of the 1947 Partition of British India with a focus on minority voices. Aspects of this project include gathering discrete historical data such as locations and descriptions of refugee camps; mapping geographical locations... Read more about Crowdsourcing Memories from the 1947 Partition of British India

City Challenges

LISH researchers are designing experiments wrapped around NYU GovLab’s City Challenges. The City Challenges program aims to use competitions and coaching to solve urban problems. See here for information on a prior challenge.

Dental Image Recognition System

In collaboration with Charite-Berlin Hospital, we are studying the drivers of variability in doctor performance when diagnosing ailments in dental x-ray images, and how multiple human-labelings of the same data can yield more reliable diagnoses of ailments. These studies aim to provide new insights on improving clinical care and... Read more about Dental Image Recognition System

Karim R. Lakhani. 2011. InnoCentive.com (A) (TN). Harvard Business School Teaching Notes. Harvard Business School. Publisher's VersionAbstract

Teaching Note for HBS Case 608-170

InnoCentive.com, a firm connecting R&D labs of large organizations to diverse external solvers through innovation contests, has to decide if it will enable collaboration in its community. Case covers the basics of a distributed innovation system works and the advantages of having external R&D. Links how concepts of open source are applied to a non-software setting. Describes the rationale for participation by solvers in innovation contests and the benefits that accrue to firms. Raises the issue if a community can be shifted to collaboration when competition was the basis of prior interaction.

Karim R. Lakhani and Greta Friar. 2014. Bioinspiration at the San Diego Zoo. Harvard Business School Teaching Plan. Harvard Business School. Publisher's VersionAbstract
This teaching plan describes an 80 minute class plan for the case Bioinspiration at the San Diego Zoo.
Traditionally, human ingenuity has been considered the main source of innovation. However, recent research and the development of new products by firms as diverse as P&G, Speedo and Nike has shown that nature can provide inspiration for new innovative products. The San Diego Zoo, which has established a Center for Bioinspiration, defines bioinspiration as a methodology in which biological systems, processes, and elements are studied to draw analogies that can be applied to human design challenges in a sustainable manner.
Christoph Riedl, Richard Zanibbi, Marti A. Hearst, Siyu Zhu, Michael Menietti, Jason Crusan, Ivan Metelsky, and Karim R. Lakhani. 2016. “Detecting Figures and Part Labels in Patents: Competition-Based Development of Image Processing Algorithms.” International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition (IJDAR), 19, 2, Pp. 155-172. Publisher's VersionAbstract

Most United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) patent documents contain drawing pages which describe inventions graphically. By convention and by rule, these drawings contain figures and parts that are annotated with numbered labels but not with text. As a result, readers must scan the document to find the description of a given part label. To make progress toward automatic creation of ‘tool-tips’ and hyperlinks from part labels to their associated descriptions, the USPTO hosted a monthlong online competition in which participants developed algorithms to detect figures and diagram part labels. The challenge drew 232 teams of two, of which 70 teams (30 %) submitted solutions. An unusual feature was that each patent was represented by a 300-dpi page scan along with an HTML file containing patent text, allowing integration of text processing and graphics recognition in participant algorithms. The design and performance of the top-5 systems are presented along with a system developed after the competition, illustrating that the winning teams produced near state-of-the-art results under strict time and computation constraints. The first place system used the provided HTML text, obtaining a harmonic mean of recall and precision (F-measure) of 88.57 % for figure region detection, 78.81 % for figure regions with correctly recognized figure titles, and 70.98 % for part label detection and recognition. Data and source code for the top-5 systems are available through the online UCI Machine Learning Repository to support follow-on work by others in the document recognition community.

Karim R. Lakhani, Marco Iansiti, and Kerry Herman. 2014. Samsung Electronics: TV in an Era of Convergence. Harvard Business School Case. Harvard Business School. Publisher's VersionAbstract

From the late 1990s to 2006/2007, Samsung Electronics moved from one of 170 TV manufacturers to gain dominant TV market share year over year from 2007-2013. As digital technologies increasingly converged in 2013-2014, the industry faced new questions: What was the future of TV? The case considers Samsung Electronics TV Group's product development processes, as the company's mobile and TV offerings increasingly converged and consumer demands and behavior pushed the historically clear boundaries of product, content, engagement and interaction.

Karim R. Lakhani and Eric Lonstein. 2011. InnoCentive.com (C). Harvard Business School Case Supplement. Harvard Business School. Publisher's VersionAbstract

InnoCentive.com enables clients to tap into internal and external solver networks to address various business issues. This case focuses on the outcome of InnoCentive's decision to post challenges related to environmental issues created by the Gulf Oil Spill. It reviews lessons learned from this experience and asks students to consider whether InnoCentive should post challenges in response to the nuclear crises resulting from the 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami.

Karim R. Lakhani and Greta Friar. 2015. Havas: Change Faster. Harvard Business School Teaching Notes. Harvard Business School. Publisher's VersionAbstract

Teaching Note for HBS Case 615-702.

As of 2013, Havas was the 6th largest global advertising, digital, and communications group in the world. Headquartered in Paris, France, the group was highly decentralized, with semi-independent agencies in more than 100 countries offering a variety of services. The largest unit of Havas was Havas Worldwide, an integrated marketing communications agency headquartered in New York, NY. CEO David Jones was determined to make Havas Worldwide the most future-focused agency in the industry by becoming a leader in digital innovation. The case explores the tensions within the company as David Jones attempts to change the company to compete in an industry undergoing digital transformation. The case uses the example of the acquisition of Victors & Spoils, a crowdsourcing advertising agency, to examine internal reactions.

Karim R. Lakhani, David A. Garvin, and Eric Lonstein. 2010. TopCoder (A): Developing Software through Crowdsourcing. Harvard Business School Case. Harvard Business School. Publisher's VersionAbstract

TopCoder's crowdsourcing-based business model, in which software is developed through online tournaments, is presented. The case highlights how TopCoder has created a unique two-sided innovation platform consisting of a global community of over 225,000 developers who compete to write software modules for its over 40 clients. Provides details of a unique innovation platform where complex software is developed through ongoing online competitions. By outlining the company's evolution, the challenges of building a community and refining a web-based competition platform are illustrated. Experiences and perspectives from TopCoder community members and clients help show what it means to work from within or in cooperation with an online community. In the case, the use of distributed innovation and its potential merits as a corporate problem solving mechanism is discussed. Issues related to TopCoder's scalability, profitability, and growth are also explored.

Karim R. Lakhani, Wesley M. Cohen, Kynon Ingram, Tushar Kothalkar, Maxim Kuzemchenko, Santosh Malik, Cynthia Meyn, Greta Friar, and Stephanie Healy Pokrywa. 2014. Netflix: Designing the Netflix Prize (A). Harvard Business School Case. Harvard Business School. Publisher's VersionAbstract
In 2006, Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, was looking for a way to solve Netflix's customer churn problem. Netflix used Cinematch, its proprietary movie recommendation software, to promote individually determined best-fit movies to customers. Hastings determined that a 10% improvement to the Cinematch algorithm would decrease customer churn and increase annual revenue by up to $89 million. However, traditional options for improving the algorithm, such as hiring and training new employees, were time intensive and costly. Hastings decided to improve Netflix's software by crowdsourcing, and began planning the Netflix Prize, an open contest searching for a 10% improvement on Cinematch. The case examines the dilemmas Hastings faced as he planned the contest, such as whether to use an existing crowdsourcing platform or create his own, what company information to expose, how to protect customer privacy while making internal datasets public, how to allocate IP, and how to manage the crowd.
Karim R. Lakhani, Eric Lonstein, and Stephanie Pokrywa. 2011. TopCoder (B). Harvard Business School Case Supplement. Harvard Business School. Publisher's VersionAbstract

Metrology plays a key role in the manufacture of mechanical components. Traditionally it is used extensively in a pre-process stage where a manufacturer does process planning, design, and ramp-up, and in post-process off-line inspection to establish proof of quality. The area that is seeing a lot of growth is the in-process stage of volume manufacturing, where feedback control can help ensure that parts are made to specification. The Industrial Metrology Group at Carl Zeiss AG had its traditional strength in high precision coordinate measuring machines, a universal measuring tool that had been widely used since its introduction in the mid-1970s. The market faced a complex diversification of competition as metrology manufacturers introduced new sensor and measurement technologies, and as some of their customers moved towards a different style of measurement mandating speed and integration with production systems. The case discusses the threat of new in-line metrology systems to the core business as well as the arising new opportunities.

Karim R. Lakhani and Greta Friar. 2015. Prodigy Network: Democratizing Real Estate Design and Financing. Harvard Business School Teaching Notes. Harvard Business School. Publisher's VersionAbstract

Teaching Note for HBS Case 614-064.

This case follows Rodrigo Nino, founder and CEO of commercial real estate development company Prodigy Network, as he develops an equity-based crowdfunding model for small investors to access commercial real estate in Colombia, then tries out the model in the U.S. U.S. regulations, starting with the Securities Act of 1933, effectively barred sponsors from soliciting small investors for large commercial real estate. However, the JOBS Act of 2013 loosened U.S. restrictions on equity crowdfunding. Nino believes that crowdfunding will democratize real estate development by providing a new asset class for small investors, revolutionizing the industry. The case also follows Nino's development of an online platform to crowdsource design for his crowdfunded buildings, maximizing shared value throughout the development process. Nino faces many challenges as he attempts to crowdfund an extended stay hotel in Manhattan, New York. For example, crowdfunded real estate faces resistance from industry leaders, especially in regards to the concern of fraud, and SEC regulations on crowdfunding remain undetermined at the time of the case.

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