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- September 2023
- Article
Consuming Contests: The Effect of Outcome Uncertainty on Spectator Attendance in the Australian Football League
By: Patrick Ferguson and Karim R. Lakhani
Contests that non-contestants consume for entertainment are a fixture of economic, cultural and political life. We exploit injury-induced changes to teams' line-ups in a professional sports setting to examine whether individuals prefer to consume contests that have...
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- April 2022 (Revised July 2022)
- Case
Stalin’s Capitalists: American Business and Soviet Industrialization
By: Jeremy Friedman, Jingyu Liu and Christine Riggle
In the late 1920s and early 1930s when Joseph Stalin, leader of the world’s first Communist state, sought to industrialize his largely peasant country on an unprecedented scale, he turned for help to those who had the most experience constructing on such a scale:...
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Keywords:
Communism;
Industrialization;
Socialism;
History;
Industry Growth;
Economic Systems;
Soviet Union
- 2021
- Working Paper
Consuming Contests: Outcome Uncertainty and Spectator Demand for Contest-based Entertainment
By: Patrick J. Ferguson and Karim R. Lakhani
Contests that are designed to be consumed for entertainment by non-contestants are a fixture of economic, cultural and political life. In this paper, we examine whether individuals prefer to consume contests that have more uncertain outcomes. We look to...
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- October 2020
- Supplement
OpenIDEO (B)
By: Karim R. Lakhani, Anne-Laure Fayard, Manos Gkeredakis and Jin Hyun Paik
In the midst of 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic was unfolding, OpenIDEO—an online open innovation platform focused on design-driven solutions to social issues—rapidly launched a new challenge to improve access to health information, empower communities to stay safe...
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Keywords:
Innovation Competitions;
IDEO;
Contests;
Contest Design;
Platforms And Ecosystems;
Open Innovation;
Open And User Innovation Strategy;
Diversity;
Design;
Social Entrepreneurship;
Global Range;
Collaborative Innovation and Invention;
Innovation Strategy;
Organizational Change and Adaptation;
Social and Collaborative Networks;
Health Pandemics;
Health;
Information;
Business and Community Relations;
Digital Platforms
- April 2019
- Article
Incentives for Public Goods Inside Organizations: Field Experimental Evidence
By: Andrea Blasco, Olivia S. Jung, Karim R. Lakhani and Michael Menietti
Understanding why employees go the extra mile at work is a key problem for many organizations. We conduct a field experiment at a medical organization to study motivations for employees to submit project proposals for organizational improvement. In total, we analyze...
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- March 2019
- Article
A Structural Analysis of the Role of Superstars in Crowdsourcing Contests
By: Shunyuan Zhang, Param Singh and Anindya Ghose
We investigate the long-term impact of competing against superstars in crowdsourcing contests. Using a unique 50-month longitudinal panel data set on 1677 software design crowdsourcing contests, we illustrate a learning effect where participants are able to improve...
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- 2016
- Chapter
Innovation Experiments: Researching Technical Advance, Knowledge Production and the Design of Supporting Institutions
By: Kevin J. Boudreau and Karim R. Lakhani
This paper discusses several challenges in designing field experiments to better understand how organizational and institutional design shapes innovation outcomes and the production of knowledge. We proceed to describe the field experimental research program carried...
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- Spring 2016
- Article
Performance Responses to Competition Across Skill-Levels in Rank Order Tournaments: Field Evidence and Implications for Tournament Design
By: Kevin J. Boudreau, Karim R. Lakhani and Michael E. Menietti
Tournaments are widely used in the economy to organize production and innovation. We study individual contestant-level data from 2,796 contestants in 774 software algorithm design contests with random assignment. Precisely conforming to theory predictions, the...
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- September 2014
- Supplement
Netflix: Designing the Netflix Prize (B)
By: Karim R. Lakhani, Wesley M. Cohen, Kynon Ingram, Tushar Kothalkar, Maxim Kuzemchenko, Santosh Malik, Cynthia Meyn, Stephanie Healy Pokrywa and Greta Friar
This supplemental case follows up on the Netflix Prize Contest described in Netflix: Designing the Netflix Prize (A). In the A case, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings must decide how to organize a crowdsourcing contest to improve the algorithms for Netflix's movie...
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- August 2014
- Case
Netflix: Designing the Netflix Prize (A)
By: Karim R. Lakhani, Wesley M. Cohen, Kynon Ingram, Tushar Kothalkar, Maxim Kuzemchenko, Santosh Malik, Cynthia Meyn, Greta Friar and Stephanie Healy Pokrywa
In 2006, Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, was looking for a way to solve Netflix's customer churn problem. Netflix used Cinematch, its proprietary movie recommendation software, to promote individually determined best-fit movies to customers. Hastings determined that a...
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Keywords:
Crowdsourcing;
Prizes;
Digitization;
Algorithms;
Recommendation Software;
Disruption;
Transformation;
Collaborative Innovation and Invention;
Technological Innovation;
Knowledge Sharing;
Applications and Software;
Motion Pictures and Video Industry;
Entertainment and Recreation Industry;
Technology Industry;
United States
- May 2011
- Article
Incentives and Problem Uncertainty in Innovation Contests: An Empirical Analysis
By: Kevin J. Boudreau, Nicola Lacetera and Karim R. Lakhani
Contests are a historically important and increasingly popular mechanism for encouraging innovation. A central concern in designing innovation contests is how many competitors to admit. Using a unique data set of 9,661 software contests, we provide evidence of two...
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- 2011
- Working Paper
The Contingent Effect of Absorptive Capacity: An Open Innovation Analysis
By: Andrew A. King and Karim R. Lakhani
Technological advancement and innovation requires the integration of both external knowledge and internal inventiveness. In this paper, we unpack the concept of absorptive capacity and separately explore the effect of different types of prior experience on the capacity...
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- 2011
- Working Paper
How Foundations Think: The Ford Foundation as a Dominating Institution in the Field of American Business Schools
By: Rakesh Khurana, Kenneth Kimura and Marion Fourcade
The question of institutional change has become central to organizational research (Powell, 2008). Recent scholarship has demonstrated, often through carefully researched cases, that institutions can and sometimes do change. According to this research, there are two...
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