Hila Lifshitz-Assaf - Faculty & Research - Harvard Business School

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Hila Lifshitz-Assaf

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Hila Lifshitz-Assaf is an an Assistant Professor at New York University Stern School of Business and a visiting scholar at Harvard Business School.

Professor Lifshitz-Assaf’s research focuses on developing an in-depth empirical and theoretical understanding of the micro-foundations of scientific and technological innovation and knowledge creation processes in the digital age. She explores how the ability to innovate is being transformed, as well as the challenges and opportunities the transformation means for R&D organizations, professionals and their work. She conducted an in-depth 3-year longitudinal field study of NASA’s experimentation with open innovation online platforms and communities, resulting in a scientific breakthrough. Her dissertation received the best dissertation Grigor McClelland Award at the European Group for Organizational Studies (EGOS) 2015.

She investigates new forms of organizing for the production of scientific and technological innovation such as crowdsourcing, open source, open online innovation communities, Wikipedia, hackathons, makeathons, etc. Her work received the prestigious INSPIRE grant from the National Science Foundation and has been presented and taught at a variety of institutions including MIT, Harvard, Stanford, INSEAD, Wharton, London Business School, Bocconi, IESE, UCL, UT Austin, Columbia and Carnegie Mellon. Most recently, she received the Industry Studies Association Frank Giarrantani Rising Star award (2017).

Prior to academia, Professor Lifshitz-Assaf worked as a strategy consultant for seven years, specializing in growth and innovation strategy in telecommunications, consumer goods and finance.

Professor Lifshitz-Assaf earned a doctorate from Harvard Business School, an MBA from Tel Aviv University, magna cum laude, a BA in Management and an LLB in Law from Tel Aviv University, Israel, both magna cum laude.

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Working Papers

  1. Working Paper | 2018

    What Is Your Problem? The Importance of ‘Problem Storming’ for Crossing Knowledge Boundaries

    Hila Lifshitz - Assaf

    In this study, I focus on the emergent processes and practices enacted when using crowdsourcing to solve R&D problems that experts are challenged with. While the literature on crowdsourcing focuses on the online process, this study looks at the full process that takes place from the origination of a problem in the hands of domain experts until its solution stage by crowds to investigate why some R&D challenges are solved by crowdsourcing while others are not. I conducted a multi-case study of each of NASA’s 14 strategic R&D challenges, using both quantitative and qualitative data from the online open innovation platforms and NASA problem-solving processes. I find a hidden process of “problem storming” that took place before opening the R&D problems to be solved by crowds, which played a critical role in reaching successful solutions. “Problem storming” is a process of questioning the current problem formulation before posting it online for crowds to solve—not only reorganizing the problem to be clear and accessible for crowds but deeply reformulating it, resulting in a different problem formulation from the original one. I detail various problem-storming practices and their impact on the solving process. Scholars have long believed that the way a problem is formulated is crucial to the way it is solved (Newell and Simon, 1972). However, since problem formulation and problem solving are two intertwined processes, our knowledge of problem-formulation processes has hardly advanced in recent decades. Distributed ways of organizing for innovation such as crowdsourcing allow us to shed light on the problem-formulation process as it is decoupled from the solving process. This study contributes to our understanding of the underlying mechanisms behind successful distributed innovation forms of organizing. It also contributes to the classic literature on problem formulation by clearly illustrating the impact of various formulation processes on solving. For practitioners, this study has significant implications since while it is accepted that the ability to reformulate problems is crucial, there are no clear reformulation processes and a thirst for guidance.

    Keywords: innovation; nasa; problem solving; problem formulation; Knowledge boundaries; Innovation and Invention; Research and Development; Problems and Challenges;

    Citation:

    Lifshitz - Assaf, Hila. "What Is Your Problem? The Importance of ‘Problem Storming’ for Crossing Knowledge Boundaries." Working Paper, April 2018.  View Details
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  2. Working Paper | 2019

    Breaking and Reconfiguring the Boundaries Between Domain Experts and Crowds to Solve Complex R&D Problems through Partial Decomposition

    Hila Lifshitz - Assaf and Zoe Szajnfarber

    The need for domain experts is all but universally assumed when organizing for scientific and technological innovation. In contrast, we are witnessing a burgeoning of citizen science, crowdsourcing, and other “open” methods based on the opposite assumption that crowds of non-domain experts can drive innovation. In this paper, we revisit the “expertise is needed” assumption and suggest how domain experts and crowds innovating together on complex problems can be more successful than either separately. We stress the strategic choice made when decomposing a complex problem and suggest how to partially decompose it to enhance integration of the crowd’s solutions. Finally, we illustrate and apply our conceptual model on the case of golf as a complex problem, assumed to be the sole domain of professionals.

    Keywords: innovation; problem solving; expertise; crowdsourcing; nasa; Experience and Expertise; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Research and Development;

    Citation:

    Lifshitz - Assaf, Hila, and Zoe Szajnfarber. "Breaking and Reconfiguring the Boundaries Between Domain Experts and Crowds to Solve Complex R&D Problems through Partial Decomposition." Working Paper, January 2019.  View Details
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  3. Working Paper | 2019

    Using Technology to Augment Professionals, Instead of Replacing Them, for Innovative Problem Solving

    Hila Lifshitz - Assaf, Felicia Ng, Aniket Kittur and Robert Kraut

    While in some technological and scientific areas innovation is flourishing, in others it is stalling, leaving important problems unsolved for decades. One explanation is professionals’ limitations as problem solvers, as accumulating depth of knowledge enhances one’s general problem-solving capabilities but also creates socio-cognitive fixation that hinders innovation. Recent technological changes have made it possible for non-professionals to innovate via online platforms and communities. Processes such as crowdsourcing suggest replacing professionals with crowds of non-professionals and potentially with learning algorithms. However, the crowdsourcing process also suffers from limitations, in particular in integration. In this paper, we closely investigate these problem-solving processes and test a new process based on using technology to augment R&D professionals instead of replacing them as problem solvers. We conducted a field study with R&D professionals from the Industrial Research Institute and crowds from Amazon Mechanical Turk, combining inductive qualitative methods with deductive experimental ones. We used an important real-world R&D problem of laundry water waste and found that the augmented R&D professionals’ process led to expanding the solution space exploration and generating more innovative solutions than either the R&D professionals only or the crowds only problem solving processes.

    Keywords: innovation; expertise; future of work; crowdsourcing; artificial intelligence; problem solving; professionalism; Experience and Expertise; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Problems and Challenges; Research and Development;

    Citation:

    Lifshitz - Assaf, Hila, Felicia Ng, Aniket Kittur, and Robert Kraut. "Using Technology to Augment Professionals, Instead of Replacing Them, for Innovative Problem Solving." Working Paper, March 2019.  View Details
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  4. Working Paper | 2019

    The Impact of Professionals' Contributions to Online Knowledge Communities on Their Workplace Knowledge Work

    Hila Lifshitz - Assaf and Frank Nagle

    Knowledge work is becoming increasingly challenging as pace of change in the knowledge frontier is increasing. Organizations have created multiple mechanisms to minimize knowledge gaps and increase learning such internal training, mentorship programs as well as encouraging their professionals to exchange knowledge outside the boundaries of the organization. Reaching outside the organizational boundaries for knowledge exchange has changed dramatically in the last decade with the rise of online professionals communities. In the case of computer science and software engineering it has become a norm to learn and as questions that used to be kept within the boundaries of the organizations, externally, with a community of external professionals help answer and learn. It is less clear whether contributing to such online communities helps improve professionals’ knowledge work or becomes a competing or distracting force from their work place knowledge work. This is the empiric puzzle our study has set to explore. We conducted a mixed method study combining qualitative data from more than 100 interviews with software professionals with a unique quantitative dataset measuring software professionals’ code productivity in their workplace by the hour/every week for one to two years.

    Keywords: open source; future of work; software development; knowledge work; online community; Learning; Knowledge Sharing; Software; Open Source Distribution; Performance Productivity;

    Citation:

    Lifshitz - Assaf, Hila, and Frank Nagle. "The Impact of Professionals' Contributions to Online Knowledge Communities on Their Workplace Knowledge Work." Working Paper, April 2019.  View Details
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Journal Articles

  1. Article | Journal of Organization Design

    Open Innovation and Organization Design

    Michael Tushman, Karim Lakhani and Hila Lifshitz - Assaf

    This paper calls the organization design community to reconcile the divergent scholarly perspectives on the relationship between firm boundaries and the locus of innovation by moving beyond debates between open vs. closed boundaries and instead embracing the notion of complex organizational boundaries where firms simultaneously pursue a range of boundary options that include "closed" vertical integration, strategic alliances with key partners, and "open" boundaries characteristic of various open innovation approaches. The simultaneous pursuit results in organizations that can attend to complex, often internally inconsistent, innovation logics and their structural and process requirements.

    Keywords: organization design; open innovation; innovation; locus of innovation; organizational structure; organizational boundaries; Organizational Design; Organizational Structure; Innovation and Invention; Alliances; Vertical Integration; Boundaries;

    Citation:

    Tushman, Michael, Karim Lakhani, and Hila Lifshitz - Assaf. "Open Innovation and Organization Design." Special Issue on The Future of Organization Design. Journal of Organization Design 1, no. 1 (2012): 24–27. (SSRN's top ten download list for: Organizational Structural Designs, Innovation & Product Development.)  View Details
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  2. Article | Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology

    Neither a Bazaar nor a Cathedral: The Interplay between Structure and Agency in Wikipedia's Role System.

    Ofer Arazy, Hila Lifshitz - Assaf and Adam Balila

    Roles provide a key coordination mechanism in peer-production. Whereas one stream in the literature has focused on the structural responsibilities associated with roles, the another has stressed the emergent nature of work. To date, these streams have proceeded largely in parallel. In seeking to enhance our understanding of the tension between structure and agency in peer-production, we investigate the interplay between structural and emergent roles. Our study explored the breadth of structural roles in Wikipedia (English version) and their linkage to various forms of activities. Our analyses show that despite the latitude in selecting their mode of participation, participants’ structural and emergent roles are tightly coupled. Our discussion highlights that: (I) participants often stay close to the “production ground floor” despite the assignment into structural roles; and (II) there are typical modifications in activity patterns associated with role-assignment, namely: functional specialization, multi-specialization, defunctionalization, changes in communication patterns, management of identity, and role definition. We contribute to theory of coordination and roles, as well as provide some practical implications.

    Keywords: Wikipedia; knowledge work; Organizational Structure; Knowledge; Information Publishing;

    Citation:

    Arazy, Ofer, Hila Lifshitz - Assaf, and Adam Balila. "Neither a Bazaar nor a Cathedral: The Interplay between Structure and Agency in Wikipedia's Role System." Art. 1. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 70, no. 1 (January 2019): 3–15.  View Details
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  3. Article | MIT Sloan Management Review

    The Art of Balancing Autonomy and Control: What Managers Can Learn from Hackathon Organizers about Spurring Innovation.

    Hila Lifshitz - Assaf, Sarah Lebovitz and Lior Zalmanson

    Today, managers recognize that innovation requires a high level of work autonomy for their employees. This encourages curiosity, enables independent thinking, and provides an environment in which employees can experiment and test new problem-solving approaches with minimal fear of failure. At the same time, top-level management and shareholders expect managers to innovate at an increasingly demanding pace, putting top-down pressure on employees to channel this autonomy into productivity. The challenge for managers becomes figuring out how to balance autonomy and control in order to achieve organizational goals without jeopardizing innovation. The world of hackathons brings the study of balancing high-speed, creative autonomy and administrative control to bear in many interesting ways. Both the hacking and making cultures are centered around creative autonomy, curiosity-led problem-solving, and freedom to independently build solutions. Managing hackathons requires bringing together myriad technologists, designers, and other professionals and supporting their free exploration while simultaneously helping them finish with working prototypes. In these high-pressure environments, how do hackathon organizers chart a path to success, and what can industry managers learn from them?

    Keywords: innovation; hackathon; autonomy; control; Innovation and Invention; Innovation and Management;

    Citation:

    Lifshitz - Assaf, Hila, Sarah Lebovitz, and Lior Zalmanson. "The Art of Balancing Autonomy and Control: What Managers Can Learn from Hackathon Organizers about Spurring Innovation." MIT Sloan Management Review 60, no. 2 (Winter 2019): 1–6.  View Details
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  5. Article | Information Systems Research

    Turbulent Stability of Emergent Roles: The Dualistic Nature of Self-Organizing Knowledge Co-Production

    Ofer Arazy, Johaness Daxenberg, Hila Lifshitz - Assaf, Oded Nov and Irene Gurevych

    Increasingly, new forms of organizing for knowledge production are built around self-organizing co-production community models with ambiguous role definitions. Current theories struggle to explain how high-quality knowledge is developed in these settings and how participants self-organize in the absence of role definitions, traditional organizational controls, or formal coordination mechanisms. In this article, we engage the puzzle by investigating the temporal dynamics underlying emergent roles on individual and organizational levels. Comprised of a multi-level large-scale empirical study of Wikipedia stretching over a decade, our study investigates emergent roles in terms of prototypical activity patterns that organically emerge from individuals’ knowledge production actions. Employing a stratified sample of a thousand Wikipedia articles, we tracked two hundred thousand distinct participants and seven hundred thousand coproduction activities, and recorded each activity’s type. We found that participants’ role taking behavior is turbulent across roles, with substantial flow in and out of co-production work. Our findings at the organizational level, however, show that work is organized around a highly stable set of emergent roles, despite the absence of traditional stabilizing mechanisms such as pre-defined work procedures or role expectations. This dualism in emergent work is onceptualized as “Turbulent Stability”. We attribute the stabilizing factor to the artifact-centric production process and present evidence to illustrate the mutual adjustment of role taking according to the artifact’s needs and stage. We discuss the importance of the a↵ordances of Wikipedia in enabling such tacit coordination. This study advances our theoretical understanding of the nature of emergent roles and self-organizing knowledge coproduction. We discuss the implications for custodians of online communities, as well as for managers of firms engaging in self-organized knowledge collaboration.

    Keywords: Wikipedia; knowledge production; Organizational Structure; Knowledge; Information Publishing;

    Citation:

    Arazy, Ofer, Johaness Daxenberg, Hila Lifshitz - Assaf, Oded Nov, and Irene Gurevych. "Turbulent Stability of Emergent Roles: The Dualistic Nature of Self-Organizing Knowledge Co-Production." Information Systems Research 27, no. 4 (December 2016): 792–812.  View Details
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  6. Article | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

    Scaling Up Analogical Innovation with Crowds and AI

    Aniket Kittur, Lisa Yu, Tom Hope, Joel Chan, Hila Lifshitz - Assaf, Karni Gilon, Felicia Ng, Robert Kraut and Dafna Shachaf

    Analogy—the ability to find and apply deep structural patterns across domains—has been fundamental to human innovation in science and technology. Today there is a growing opportunity to accelerate innovation by moving analogy out of a single person’s mind and distributing it across many information processors, both human and machine. Doing so has the potential to overcome cognitive fixation, scale to large idea repositories, and support complex problems with multiple constraints. Here we lay out a perspective on the future of scalable analogical innovation and first steps using crowds and artificial intelligence (AI) to augment creativity that quantitatively demonstrate the promise of the approach, as well as core challenges critical to realizing this vision.

    Keywords: innovation; artificial intelligence; crowdsourcing; analogy; Innovation and Invention; Technology; Science;

    Citation:

    Kittur, Aniket, Lisa Yu, Tom Hope, Joel Chan, Hila Lifshitz - Assaf, Karni Gilon, Felicia Ng, Robert Kraut, and Dafna Shachaf. "Scaling Up Analogical Innovation with Crowds and AI." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 116, no. 6 (February 5, 2019): 1870–1877.  View Details
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  7. Article | Administrative Science Quarterly

    Dismantling Knowledge Boundaries at NASA: The Critical Role of Professional Identity in Open Innovation

    Hila Lifshitz - Assaf

    Using a longitudinal in-depth field study at NASA, I investigate how the open, or peer-production, innovation model affects R&D professionals, their work, and the locus of innovation. R&D professionals are known for keeping their knowledge work within clearly defined boundaries, protecting it from individuals outside those boundaries, and rejecting meritorious innovation that is created outside disciplinary boundaries. The open innovation model challenges these boundaries and opens the knowledge work to be conducted by anyone who chooses to contribute. At NASA, the open model led to a scientific breakthrough at unprecedented speed using unusually limited resources; yet it challenged not only the knowledge-work boundaries but also the professional identity of the R&D professionals. This led to divergent reactions from R&D professionals, as adopting the open model required them to go through a multifaceted transformation. Only R&D professionals who underwent identity refocusing work dismantled their boundaries, truly adopting the knowledge from outside and sharing their internal knowledge. Others who did not go through that identity work failed to incorporate the solutions the open model produced. Adopting open innovation without a change in R&D professionals’ identity resulted in no real change in the R&D process. This paper reveals how such processes unfold and illustrates the critical role of professional identity work in changing knowledge-work boundaries and shifting the locus of innovation.

    Keywords: innovation; Knowledge boundaries; Boundary Work; professional identity; open innovation; identity work; technological change; nasa; Innovation and Invention; Knowledge; Science; Technology; Engineering; Change; Aerospace Industry; North and Central America;

    Citation:

    Lifshitz - Assaf, Hila. "Dismantling Knowledge Boundaries at NASA: The Critical Role of Professional Identity in Open Innovation." Administrative Science Quarterly 63, no. 4 (December 2018): 746–782.  View Details
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Book Chapters

  1. Chapter | Handbook of Economic Organization: Integrating Economic and Organization Theory | 2013

    Open Innovation and Organizational Boundaries: Task Decomposition, Knowledge Distribution and the Locus of Innovation

    Karim R. Lakhani, Hila Lifshitz - Assaf and Michael Tushman

    This chapter contrasts traditional, organization-centered models of innovation with more recent work on open innovation. These fundamentally different and inconsistent innovation logics are associated with contrasting organizational boundaries and organizational designs. We suggest that when critical tasks can be modularized and when problem-solving knowledge is widely distributed and available, open innovation complements traditional innovation logics. We induce these ideas from the literature and with extended examples from Apple, NASA, and LEGO. We suggest that task decomposition and problem-solving knowledge distribution are not deterministic but are strategic choices. If dynamic capabilities are associated with innovation streams, and if different innovation types are rooted in contrasting innovation logics, there are important implications for firm boundaries, design, and identity.

    Keywords: innovation; organizational boundaries; Institutional Logics; modular innovation; open innovation; Knowledge Sharing; Innovation Strategy; Organizational Design; Boundaries; Collaborative Innovation and Invention;

    Citation:

    Lakhani, Karim R., Hila Lifshitz - Assaf, and Michael Tushman. "Open Innovation and Organizational Boundaries: Task Decomposition, Knowledge Distribution and the Locus of Innovation." Chap. 19 in Handbook of Economic Organization: Integrating Economic and Organization Theory, edited by Anna Grandori, 355–382. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2013.  View Details
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