Platforms & Crowds

On December 4th, 2016 the Digital Seminar series hosted Siobhan O’Mahony and Rebecca Karp from Boston University.

What if you could spin up an entire organization of qualified experts in a matter of moments? This is precisely what Stanford’s Melissa Valentine and Michael Bernstein aim to accomplish with their research on Flash Orgs (crowdsourcing complex work using reconfigurable organizational structures).

In November 2015, Zipcar Co-Founder Robin Chase inspired the crowd at the Harvard Business School Digital Transformation Summit by challenging them to use platforms and peers to build exponential solutions to some of the world’s most challenging problems.

Presented at the Digital Initiative 2017 Future Assembly, in this flash talk, Ned Gulley from Mathworks explains how crowd-based programming contests can serve as a way to identify talent and skills.

In this talk from our 2017 Digital Transformation Summit, Mike Tushman the Paul R. Lawrence MBA Class of 1942 Professor of Business Administration from Harvard Business School digs into the impact of crowds on incumbent firms.

In this talk from our 2017 Digital Transformation Summit, Chiara Farronato an Assistant Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and Andrei Hagiu a visiting Associate Professor of Technological Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Strategic Management at MIT Sloan School of Management moderated the panel.

During the 2015 Digital Transformation Summit, HBS Professor Sunil Gupta, Ernst & Young’s Janet Balis, and Twitter’s Glenn Otis Brown shared their thoughts on mobile commerce is effecting markets, business strategy and what people think of as money.

On April 6th, 2016 the Digital Seminar series hosted Christoph Riedl from the D’Amore-McKim School of Business at Northeastern University.

On November 5th, 2014 the Digital Seminar series hosted CV Harquail from FeministsAtWork. CV gave a talk called “Generative Business Practice: How Digital Technologies, a Network Orientation, and an Ethos of Generosity Combine to Transform How Businesses Work Together.”

In this flash talk from our 2017 Future Assembly, Professor Andrei Hagiu from MIT Sloan School of Management highlights how companies can tap in to one of the most promising and profitable aspects of business today: the platform economy.