Karim R. Lakhani

Who is Karim R. Lakhani?

Karim R. Lakhani is an associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. His research and teaching focuses on open and user innovation. His is one of the foremost academic experts on and author of several of the most highly cited articles on free and open source software and the co-founder of open source research community hosted at MIT. He edited the book Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software published by MIT Press.

In addition to Open Source, Lakhani's is cited as leading academic expert on the topic of crowdsourcing. In particular, he is known for his research on the t-shirt company Threadless, and prize-based open innovation firms like InnoCentive & TopCoder. Currently he is the principal investigator for the Harvard-NASA Tournament Lab.

Lakhani earned his PhD at the MIT Sloan School of Management and was advised by Eric von Hippel, Tom Allen, and Wanda Orlikowski.