Companies that contribute to (and use) open source software can gain a competitive advantage—even though they may be helping their competitors in the short run. The reason? Contributing to crowdsourced “public goods” that benefit other firms or industries can enable companies to gain valuable insights and compete more effectively in the long term. Call it the “Linux effect.”
Despite its centrality to the functioning of society, the technology that governs contracts, transactions, and record keeping has not kept up with the digital transformation of the economy. Blockchain, however, has the potential to change all that – that is, if it can overcome multiple barriers to adoption. In this article for HBR, DI professors Marco Iansiti and Karim Lakhani share what it would really take for blockchain to become the revolutionary technology everyone hopes it will be.
This article takes a look at the thriving tech culture on the Harvard Business School campus, and explores how MBA students view the value of opportunities to become more technical. If “coding is the new business literacy,” then the CODE club at HBS is going for fluency.
The advent of Google Street View and machine learning algorithms has enabled us to study urban change in a way that’s unlike anything we’ve quite seen before. In this joint study between HBS, Harvard, and MIT, researchers demonstrate how cities evolve and why it underscores the importance of human capital and education in defining urban outcomes.