The Truth about Blockchain

Marco   Iansiti; Karim R. Lakhani

Article | Harvard Business Review | January–February 2017

The Truth about Blockchain

Abstract

Contracts, transactions, and records of them provide critical structure in our economic system, but they haven’t kept up with the world’s digital transformation. They’re like rush-hour gridlock trapping a Formula 1 race car. Blockchain promises to solve this problem. The technology behind bitcoin, blockchain is an open, distributed ledger that records transactions safely, permanently and very efficiently. For instance, while the transfer of a share of stock can now take up to a week, with blockchain it could happen in seconds. Blockchain could slash the cost of transactions and eliminate intermediaries like lawyers and bankers, and that could transform the economy. But, like the adoption of more Internet technologies, blockchain’s adoption will require broad coordination and will take years. The authors describe the path that blockchain is likely to follow and explain how firms should think about investments in it.

Keywords: Technological Innovation; Technology Adoption; Information Management; Information Technology Industry;

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Citation:

Iansiti, Marco, and Karim R. Lakhani. "The Truth about Blockchain." Harvard Business Review 95, no. 1 (January–February 2017): 118–127.

Indigo Agriculture used a digital-enabled research and development (R&D) process to launch its initial product, microbial coatings for agricultural seeds, which increase crop yields while reducing the need for fertilizers. In doing so, the company developed direct relationships with farmers, in contrast to typical agricultural supply chains that use intermediaries. The company then launched a marketplace platform to link growers directly to crop buyers, again disintermediating the market. Indigo Agriculture is now considering launching an initiative to incentivize farmers to engage in regenerative agricultural practices by setting up a carbon market that could pay them for sequestering carbon into their soils. If scaled globally, the idea could sequester as much as one trillion tons (a teraton) of carbon dioxide from the earth’s atmosphere into agricultural soils, but pursing the idea has many risks.

Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2019

Engineering Serendipity: The Role of Cognitive Similarity in Knowledge Sharing and Knowledge Production

Jacqueline N. Lane, Ina Ganguli, Patrick Gaule, Eva C. Guinan and Karim R. Lakhani

We consider how the cognitive similarity between knowledge-sharing partners affects the knowledge-production process, namely knowledge transfer, creation, and diffusion. We theorize that knowledge production is systematically shaped by the field and intellectual similarity between knowledge-sharing partners’ disciplines of study and domain area interests. To estimate relationships, we designed and executed a natural field experiment at a medical symposium, in which exogenous variation was introduced to provide some of the 15,817 scientist pairs with opportunities for serendipitous, face-to-face encounters. Our data include direct observations of interaction patterns collected using sociometric badges, and detailed longitudinal data on the scientists’ publication records for six years following the symposium. We find both cooperative and competitive effects of cognitive similarity on knowledge production. While knowledge sharing increases the transfer of scientific concepts between scientists with some intellectual overlap, it reduces the diffusion of scientific knowledge between scientists from the same field. In contrast, cognitive similarity does not have a direct effect on knowledge creation, but we find that scientists who have initiated early-stage collaborations with one another are more likely to persist and publish together. The findings suggest that some cognitive similarity between knowledge-sharing partners can boost organizational knowledge production, but too much similarity may impede it.

Citation:

Lane, Jacqueline N., Ina Ganguli, Patrick Gaule, Eva C. Guinan, and Karim R. Lakhani. "Engineering Serendipity: The Role of Cognitive Similarity in Knowledge Sharing and Knowledge Production." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 20-058, November 2019. View Details

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Incentivizing employees to engage with novel innovation mechanisms and contribute to collective problem-solving can be difficult. We run a field experiment with NASA (N=11,192) to study two widely used classes of non-financial incentives: recognition (of managers, peers, online platform participants), and the prospect of advancing the organizational mission. Our analysis shows that managerial recognition has a significant positive effect on employees’ engagement with the problem-solving platform. The other incentives are not found to be effective. A follow-up interview study suggests that (1) managerial recognition works through signaling the platform’s legitimacy in a context of uncertainty, as well as through offering managerial attention and appreciation; (2) recognition interacts with workers’ job proximity to the organization’s mission and can be particularly motivating for workers with distant job functions; (3) organizations where the appeal of the organizational mission is already strong may face difficulties in using the mission as an instrumental incentive.

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The Truth about Blockchain

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