Platforms & Crowds

This post was originally published on the Digital Initiative’s classroom blogging platform. See how a 179-year-old company has created the go-to platform for the agricultural industry, allowing John Deere to compete against both other farm equipment manufacturers as well as new Ag Tech entrants. John Deere is the number one farm equipment manufacturer in the […]

“With the advent of the Internet, the idea that the organization needs to monopolize people, ideas, and assets has been turned upside down.” Professor Karim Lakhani from Harvard Business School started studying the world of crowdsourcing years ago, when he wanted to determine what motivated people to contribute to open source software projects. Since then, he […]

Professor Karim Lakhani, co-chair of the 2016 Open and User Innovation Conference, talks with Matt Tucker about how people outside the traditional boundaries of firms are radically changing the innovation process. Tucker: Thanks for taking the time to talk to me about Revolutionizing Innovation. It’s a new book that you’ve edited with Dietmar Harhoff that […]

Blockchain is one of a handful of technologies poised to transform a multitude of industries, and yet its promise remains relatively unrealized. However, HBS alumnus Yezi Peng (MBA 2017) thinks that the blockchain platform Ethereum might just have the power to usher blockchain into widespread usage.

musica.ly was one of the hottest apps of 2015 and 2016 — and hasn’t left the App Store Top 40 ever since. Are its 15-second videos a one-hit wonder, or are they here to stay?

On March 8th, 2017 the Digital Seminar series hosted Andrew Mao from Aarhus University. Andrew gave a talk called “Studying Teamwork and Cooperation in the Virtual Lab.”

Much fanfare has been made of the promise and potential of the platform economy, predominantly for its flexibility and efficiency, but for workers in the “gig economy,” is it really a reasonable way to earn a living? This is the central question at the heart of Juliet Schor’s (Boston College) research on some of the big six providers: Airbnb, TaskRabbit, Uber, Lyft, Postmates and Favor.

On March 22nd, 2017 the Digital Seminar series hosted Gerald (Jerry) Kane from Boston College. Jerry gave a talk called “Wikipedia: The Canary in the Coal Mine for Online Collaboration.”

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).