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• Case | HBS Case Collection | 2013

  SaferTaxi: Connecting Taxis and Passengers in South America

  Peter Coles and Benjamin Edelman

  SaferTaxi, a taxi booking service in South America must develop its mobilization strategy; that is, it must attract enough passengers and drivers to make its service worthwhile for all. Drivers hesitate to pay for SaferTaxi's smartphones and service unless these will deliver passenger bookings—and passengers have no reason to sign up unless drivers are available. Meanwhile, regulators question the permissibility of online taxi booking in light of regulatory requirements, and some existing taxi booking vendors feel threatened by SaferTaxi's efforts to enter the market. As SaferTaxi attempts to satisfy these diverse constituents, international competition looms. What should SaferTaxi's founders do next?

  Keywords: taxi booking; smartphone; Transportation Networks; Network Effects; Laws and Statutes; South America; Argentina; Brazil; Chile;

  Citation:

  Coles, Peter, and Benjamin Edelman. "SaferTaxi: Connecting Taxis and Passengers in South America." Harvard Business School Case 913-041, April 2013.

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• Article | MIT Sloan Management Review | Spring, 2013

  Experiments in Open Innovation at Harvard Medical School

  Eva C. Guinan, Kevin J. Boudreau and Karim R. Lakhani

  Harvard Medical School seems an unlikely organization to open up its innovation process. By most measures, the more than 20,000 faculty, research staff and graduate students affiliated with Harvard Medical School are already world class and at the top of the medical research game, with approximately $1.4 billion in annual funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). But in February 2010, Drew Faust, president of Harvard University, sent an email invitation to all faculty, staff and students at the university (more than 40,000 individuals) encouraging them to participate in an ideas challenge that Harvard Medical School had launched to generate research topics in Type 1 diabetes. Eventually, the challenge was shared with more than 250,000 invitees, resulting in 150 research ideas and hypotheses. The goal of opening up idea generation and disaggregating the different stages of the research process was to expand the number and range of people who might participate. Today, seven teams of multi-disciplinary researchers are working on the resulting potential breakthrough ideas. In this article, we describe how leaders of Harvard Catalyst, an organization whose mission is to drive therapies from the lab to patients bedsides faster and to do so by working across the many silos of Harvard Medical School, chose to implement principles of open and distributed innovation.

  Citation:

  Guinan, Eva C., Kevin J. Boudreau, and Karim R. Lakhani. "Experiments in Open Innovation at Harvard Medical School." Art. 3. MIT Sloan Management Review 54, no. 3 (Spring, 2013): 45–52.

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• Article | Harvard Business Review | April 2013

  Using the Crowd as an Innovation Partner

  Kevin J. Boudreau and Karim R. Lakhani

  Citation:

  Boudreau, Kevin J., and Karim R. Lakhani. "Using the Crowd as an Innovation Partner." Harvard Business Review 91, no. 4 (April 2013): 61–69.

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