More from the Author

• 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.

  CiteView DetailsFind at Harvard

  Related

• 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.

  CiteView DetailsFind at Harvard

  Related

• Article | Nature Biotechnology | February, 2013

  Prize-based Contests Can Provide Solutions to Computational Biology Problems

  Karim R. Lakhani, Kevin Boudreau, Eva C. Guinan, Carliss Y. Baldwin, Alan MacCormack, Eric Lonstein, Mike Lydon and Ramy A Arnaout

  Advances in biotechnology have fueled the generation of unprecedented quantities of data across the life sciences. However, finding analysts who can address such "big data" problems effectively has become a significant research bottleneck. Historically, prize-based contests have had striking success in attracting unconventional individuals who can overcome difficult challenges. To determine whether this approach could solve a real big-data biologic algorithm problem, we used a complex immunogenomics problem as the basis for a two-week online contest broadcast to participants outside academia and biomedical disciplines. Participants in our contest produced over 600 submissions containing 89 novel computational approaches to the problem. Thirty submissions exceeded the benchmark performance of the U.S. National Institutes of Health's MegaBLAST. The best achieved both greater accuracy and speed (1,000 times greater). Here we show the potential of using online prize-based contests to access individuals without domain-specific backgrounds to address big-data challenges in the life sciences.

  Citation:

  Lakhani, Karim R., Kevin Boudreau, Eva C. Guinan, Carliss Y. Baldwin, Alan MacCormack, Eric Lonstein, Mike Lydon, and Ramy A Arnaout. "Prize-based Contests Can Provide Solutions to Computational Biology Problems." Nature Biotechnology 31, no. 2 (February, 2013): 108–111.

  CiteView DetailsFind at HarvardRead Now

  Related