Technology and Innovation

Technology and Innovation is a featured research topic at Harvard Business School.

The early works of William Abernathy on roadblocks to innovation and Richard Rosenbloom on technology and information transfers in the 1960's and 1970's started the Technology Strategy field and helped pave the path for our research today, which focuses on value creation of platforms and two-sided markets; use of open architecture and leverage of its collective value; development and execution of innovation strategies; innovative attributes of executives and firms; development of new markets through the creation of disruptive innovations that displace earlier technologies; development of innovations in sectors; and the impact of innovation on economic growth.

Featured Works

Article | Management Science | December 2014
The Distinct Effects of Information Technology and Communication Technology on Firm Organization
Nicholas Bloom, Luis Garicano, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen
Empirical studies on information communication technologies (ICT) typically aggregate the "information" and "communication" components together. We show theoretically and empirically that this is problematic. Information and communication technologies have very different effects on the decisions taken at each level of an organization. Better information access pushes decisions down, as it allows for superior decentralized decision making without an undue cognitive burden on those lower in the hierarchy. Better communication pushes decisions up, as it allows employees to rely on those above them in the hierarchy to make decisions. Using an original dataset of firms from the U.S. and seven European countries we study the impact of ICT on worker autonomy, plant manager autonomy, and span of control. Consistent with the theory, we find that better information technologies (Enterprise Resource Planning, ERP, for plant managers and CAD/CAM for production workers) are associated with more autonomy and a wider span of control. By contrast, communication technologies (like data networks) decrease autonomy for both workers and plant managers. Treating technology as endogenous using instrumental variables (distance from the birthplace of ERP and heterogeneous telecommunication costs arising from different regulatory regimes) strengthens our results.
Keywords: Communication Technology; Information Technology; Organizational Structure;

Citation:
Bloom, Nicholas, Luis Garicano, Raffaella Sadun, and John Van Reenen. "The Distinct Effects of Information Technology and Communication Technology on Firm Organization." Management Science 60, no. 12 (December 2014): 2859–2885. View Details
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Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2014
Bridging Science and Technology Through Academic-Industry Partnerships
Sen Chai and Willy C. Shih
Scientific research and its translation into commercialized technology is a driver of wealth creation and economic growth. Partnerships to foster the translational processes from public research organizations, such as universities and hospitals, to private firms are a policy tool that has attracted increased interest. Yet questions about the efficacy and the efficiency with which funds are used are subject to frequent debate. This paper examines empirical data from the Danish National Advanced Technology Foundation (DNATF), an agency that funds partnerships between universities and private companies to develop technologies important to Danish industry. We assess the effect of a unique mediated funding scheme that combines project grants with active facilitation and conflict management on firm performance, comparing the likelihood of bankruptcy and employee count as well as patent count, publication count and their citations and collaborative nature between funded and unfunded firms. Because randomization of the sample was not feasible, we address endogeneity around selection bias using a sample of qualitatively similar firms based on a funding decision score. This allows us to observe the local effect of samples in which we drop the best recipients and the worst non-recipients. Our results suggest that while receiving the grant does bring an injection of funding that alleviates financing constraints, its core effect on the firm's innovative behavior is in fostering collaborations and translations between science and technology and encouraging riskier projects rather than purely increasing patenting.
Keywords: innovation; firm performance; public-private partnership funding; translational research; small and medium enterprises; Partners and Partnerships; Public Sector; Private Sector; Performance; Science-Based Business; Innovation and Invention;

Citation:
Chai, Sen, and Willy C. Shih. "Bridging Science and Technology Through Academic-Industry Partnerships." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 13-058, January 2013. (Revised July 2014.) View Details
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Article | Emotion | April 2014
Botsourcing and Outsourcing: Robot, British, Chinese, and German Workers Are for Thinking—Not Feeling—Jobs
Adam Waytz and Michael I. Norton
Technological innovations have produced robots capable of jobs that, until recently, only humans could perform. The present research explores the psychology of "botsourcing"—the replacement of human jobs by robots—while examining how understanding botsourcing can inform the psychology of outsourcing—the replacement of jobs in one country by humans from other countries. We test four related hypotheses across six experiments: (1) Given people's lay theories about the capacities for cognition and emotion for robots and humans, workers will express more discomfort with botsourcing when they consider losing jobs that require emotion versus cognition; (2) people will express more comfort with botsourcing when jobs are framed as requiring cognition versus emotion; (3) people will express more comfort with botsourcing for jobs that do require emotion if robots appear to convey more emotion; and (4) people prefer to outsource cognition-oriented versus emotion-oriented jobs to other humans who are perceived as more versus less robotic. These results have theoretical implications for understanding social cognition about both humans and nonhumans and practical implications for the increasingly botsourced and outsourced economy.
Keywords: Technology; Job Cuts and Outsourcing; Emotions; Cognition and Thinking;

Citation:
Waytz, Adam, and Michael I. Norton. "Botsourcing and Outsourcing: Robot, British, Chinese, and German Workers Are for Thinking—Not Feeling—Jobs." Emotion 14, no. 2 (April 2014): 434–444. View Details
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Article | Harvard Business Review
Digital Ubiquity: How Connections, Sensors, and Data Are Revolutionizing Business
Marco Iansiti and Karim R. Lakhani
When Google bought Nest, a maker of digital thermostats, for $3.2 billion just a few months ago, it was a clear indication that digital transformation and connection are spreading across even the most traditional industrial segments and creating a staggering array of business opportunities and threats. The digitization of tasks and processes has become essential to competition. General Electric, for example, was at risk of losing many of its top customers to nontraditional competitors—IBM and SAP on the one hand, big data start-ups on the other—offering data-intensive, analytics-based services that could connect to any industrial device. So GE launched a multibillion-dollar initiative focused on what it calls the industrial internet: adding digital sensors to its machines; connecting them to a common, cloud-based software platform; investing in software development capabilities; building advanced analytics capabilities; and embracing crowd-based product development. With all this, GE is evolving its business model. Now, for example, revenue from its jet engines is tied to reduced downtime and miles flown over the course of a year. After just three years, GE is generating more than $1.5 billion in incremental income with digitally enabled, outcomes-based business models. The company expects that number to double in 2014 and again in 2015.
Keywords: Digital Innovation; digitization; industrial internet; Technological Innovation; Production; Competitive Strategy; Engineering; Aerospace Industry;

Citation:
Iansiti, Marco, and Karim R. Lakhani. "Digital Ubiquity: How Connections, Sensors, and Data Are Revolutionizing Business." Harvard Business Review 92, no. 11 (November 2014): 90–99. View Details
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Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2014
The Decoupling Effect of Digital Disruptors
Thales S. Teixeira and Peter Jamieson
While the Internet's first wave of disruption was marked by the unbundling of digital content, the second wave, decoupling, promises to generate more casualties in an even broader array of industries. Digital start-ups are disrupting traditional businesses by inserting themselves at every juncture in the customer's consumption chain. By decoupling—the act of separating activities that people are used to co-consuming—new digital businesses are disrupting retailing, telecom and other industries. Decoupling allows consumers to benefit from the value created at a lower cost or effort compared to what is delivered by traditional businesses. For those companies, the only solutions are to either recouple activities or rebalance to create and capture value (i.e., revenues) from both activities separately. Here, digital technologies can be seen as an instrument that will both disrupt traditional business models and potentially preserve them.
Keywords: Disruptive Innovation; Information Technology;

Citation:
Teixeira, Thales S., and Peter Jamieson. "The Decoupling Effect of Digital Disruptors." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 15-031, October 2014. View Details
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Recent Publications

Article | Research Policy | November 2020
Migrant Inventors and the Technological Advantage of Nations
Dany Bahar, Prithwiraj Choudhury and Hillel Rapoport
We investigate the relationship between the presence of migrant inventors and the dynamics of innovation in the migrants’ receiving countries. We find that countries are 25 to 60 percent more likely to gain advantage in patenting in certain technologies given a twofold increase in the number of foreign inventors from other nations that specialize in those same technologies. For the average country in our sample, this number corresponds to only 25 inventors and a standard deviation of 135. We deal with endogeneity concerns by using historical migration networks to instrument for stocks of migrant inventors. Our results generalize the evidence of previous studies that show how migrant inventors "import" knowledge from their home countries, which translates into higher patenting in the receiving countries. We interpret these results as tangible evidence of migrants facilitating the technology-specific diffusion of knowledge across nations.
Keywords: innovation; migration; patent; knowledge; Innovation and Invention; Immigration; Patents; Technology; Knowledge Dissemination;

Citation:
Bahar, Dany, Prithwiraj Choudhury, and Hillel Rapoport. "Migrant Inventors and the Technological Advantage of Nations." Special Issue on STEM Migration, Research, and Innovation. Research Policy 49, no. 9 (November 2020). View Details
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Case | HBS Case Collection | September 2020
True North: Pioneering Analytics, Algorithms and Artificial Intelligence
Karim R. Lakhani, Kairavi Dey and Hannah Mayer
True North was a private equity fund that specialized in the growth and buyout of mid-market, India-centric companies. The leadership team initially believed that technology was not core to traditional businesses and steered clear of new age technology-oriented businesses. Then, in 2007, True North invested in Meru Cabs, a ride-sharing service with a growing fleet of cabs that had to change its business model with the launch of tech-based platforms like Uber. This experience led True North to significantly alter its stance on the importance of technology-powered business models. The team learned that all businesses needed to effectively become technology businesses to remain relevant. True North initiated the “Analytics, Algorithms and Artificial Intelligence” (3A) project. A system, Kelp, was designed and developed internally to facilitate the transformation of True North into an AI-first firm based on the introduction of data-driven decision making and productivity-enhancing digital tools. In 2020, as different elements of Kelp were launched, the leadership team met to discuss the future of this technology.
Keywords: Technology; Management; Operations; Organizations; Leadership; Innovation and Invention; Business Model; Computer Industry; Technology Industry;

Citation:
Lakhani, Karim R., Kairavi Dey, and Hannah Mayer. "True North: Pioneering Analytics, Algorithms and Artificial Intelligence." Harvard Business School Case 621-042, September 2020. View Details
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Case | HBS Case Collection | August 2020
Zoom Video Communications: Eric Yuan's Leadership During COVID-19
Scott Duke Kominers, Christopher Stanton, Andy Wu and George Gonzalez
In the first half of 2020, worldwide lockdowns caused by the COVID-19 pandemic brought explosive growth to the Zoom Video Communications platform, as people replaced in-person work and social events with videoconferencing. Months into the pandemic, CEO Eric Yuan reflects on his company's newly central role in society, and considers how to leverage the platform's broad adoption into sustainable future growth. The case also discusses Zoom’s internal culture—which prioritized employee and customer happiness—as well as how both the company and its customers faced the transition to remote work.
Keywords: Transformation; Communication Technology; Customer Value and Value Chain; Values and Beliefs; Technological Innovation; Leadership; Crisis Management; Organizational Culture; Working Conditions; Strategy; Information Technology; Software; Technology Adoption; Health Pandemics; Technology Industry; United States; California;

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke, Christopher Stanton, Andy Wu, and George Gonzalez. "Zoom Video Communications: Eric Yuan's Leadership During COVID-19." Harvard Business School Case 821-014, August 2020. View Details
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Case | HBS Case Collection | July 2020
Vineet Nayar and Sampark Foundation: Frugal Innovation at Scale (A)
Linda A. Hill and Emily Tedards
In 2005, Vineet Nayar, the former CEO and Vice Chairman of HCL Technologies, and his wife, Anupama Nayar, committed $100 million of their personal wealth to found Sampark Foundation—a grant-making philanthropy with a mission to transform learning outcomes for 20 million children in rural government schools by 2025. By 2013, it was clear that Sampark was never going to reach 20 million children by writing grants. Vineet stepped out of the corporate world and over the next six years, applied the lessons he learned about leading change at HCL to transform Sampark into a “disruptive design shop” that leveraged frugal innovation and a “Teachers First” model of change to revolutionize India’s primary education system. By 2019, at $1 per child per annum, Sampark’s 130 employees had touched the lives of over 7 million students and 200,000 teachers across 90,000 public schools—unprecedented scale in the Indian education context and evidence that their “Teachers First” strategy was working. Demand for Sampark’s program was growing rapidly and Vineet now had the opportunity to reach 50 million children. Vineet had always believed in the transformative power of technology and had to determine whether Sampark could transition to a “Digital First” model.
Keywords: organizational behavior; cultural change; digital; digital transformation; innovation; experimentation; metrics; education reform; non-profit; frugal innovation; Scale; ecosystem; government; Education; Social Enterprise; Leadership; Leading Change; Change Management; Organizational Culture; Innovation Leadership; Nonprofit Organizations; Growth and Development Strategy; Technology; India;

Citation:
Hill, Linda A., and Emily Tedards. "Vineet Nayar and Sampark Foundation: Frugal Innovation at Scale (A)." Harvard Business School Case 421-015, July 2020. View Details
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Case | HBS Case Collection | July 2020
Vineet Nayar and Sampark Foundation: Frugal Innovation at Scale (A) (Abridged)
Linda A. Hill and Emily Tedards
In 2005, Vineet Nayar, the former CEO and Vice Chairman of HCL Technologies, and his wife, Anupama Nayar, committed $100 million of their personal wealth to found Sampark Foundation—a grant-making philanthropy with a mission to transform learning outcomes for 20 million children in rural government schools by 2025. By 2013, it was clear that Sampark was never going to reach 20 million children by writing grants. Vineet stepped out of the corporate world and over the next six years, applied the lessons he learned about leading change at HCL to transform Sampark into a “disruptive design shop” that leveraged frugal innovation and a “Teachers First” model of change to revolutionize India’s primary education system. By 2019, at $1 per child per annum, Sampark’s 130 employees had touched the lives of over 7 million students and 200,000 teachers across 90,000 public schools—unprecedented scale in the Indian education context and evidence that their “Teachers First” strategy was working. Demand for Sampark’s program was growing rapidly and Vineet now had the opportunity to reach 50 million children. Vineet had always believed in the transformative power of technology and had to determine whether Sampark could transition to a “Digital First” model.
Keywords: organizational behavior; organizational alignment; culture change; digital; digital transformation; innovation; experimentation; metrics; education reform; non-profit; frugal innovation; Scale; ecosystem; government; Education; Social Enterprise; Leadership; Leading Change; Change Management; Organizational Culture; Alignment; Innovation Leadership; Nonprofit Organizations; Growth and Development Strategy; Technology; India;

Citation:
Hill, Linda A., and Emily Tedards. "Vineet Nayar and Sampark Foundation: Frugal Innovation at Scale (A) (Abridged)." Harvard Business School Case 421-021, July 2020. View Details
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Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2020
SSRIs and Non-SSRIs: Case Histories of Significant Medical Advances
Amar Bhidé, Srikant M. Datar and Katherine Stebbins
Prozac is widely hailed as “a breakthrough drug for depression.” In 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that over 264 million people worldwide suffer from depression, and 800,000 die by suicide each year. In 2014, researchers calculated the economic impact of depression—in terms of lost productivity, absenteeism, and treatment costs—to be USD$63 billion per year in the United States alone. Depression’s toll on lives and livelihoods prompted the WHO to place Prozac on its list of essential medicines in 2009.
Keywords: Health Care and Treatment; Technological Innovation; Innovation Strategy; Technology Adoption; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Innovation and Invention; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms;

Citation:
Bhidé, Amar, Srikant M. Datar, and Katherine Stebbins. "SSRIs and Non-SSRIs: Case Histories of Significant Medical Advances." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 20-135, July 2020. View Details
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Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2020
Tamoxifen: Case Histories of Significant Medical Advances
Amar Bhidé, Srikant Datar and Katherine Stebbins
Our case history describes the development of tamoxifen, considered a “gold standard” treatment for millions of breast cancer patients. Specifically, we describe breast cancer treatments prior to tamoxifen’s development; the initial development of tamoxifen from 1960 to 1973; tamoxifen’s adoption as an adjuvant breast cancer treatment between 1973 and 1985; and the extension of tamoxifen’s use to include preventative treatment, between 1986 and 2002.
Keywords: Health Care and Treatment; Technological Innovation; Innovation and Invention; Innovation Strategy; Technology Adoption; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms;

Citation:
Bhidé, Amar, Srikant Datar, and Katherine Stebbins. "Tamoxifen: Case Histories of Significant Medical Advances." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 20-134, July 2020. (Revised August 2020.) View Details
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Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2020
Cephalosporins: Case Histories of Significant Medical Advances
Amar Bhidé, Srikant Datar and Katherine Stebbins
Our case history describes the development of three generations of cephalosporins – antibiotics that have significantly reduced hospital infections. Specifically, we chronicle how: 1) Early (pre-cephalosporin) antibiotics were developed in the first half of the 20th century. 2) Drug companies developed first-generation cephalosporins in the 1960s using foundational discoveries made by researchers in Italy and the UK in the 1940s and 1950s. 3) Continued modifications of cephalosporin molecules resulted in second and third generation of the drugs in the 1970s and 1980s.
Keywords: Health Care and Treatment; Technological Innovation; Innovation Strategy; Technology Adoption; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Innovation and Invention; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms;

Citation:
Bhidé, Amar, Srikant Datar, and Katherine Stebbins. "Cephalosporins: Case Histories of Significant Medical Advances." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 20-133, July 2020. (Revised August 2020.) View Details
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Case | HBS Case Collection | June 2020 (Revised July 2020)
TraceTogether
Mitchell B. Weiss and Sarah Mehta
By April 7, 2020, over 1.4 million people worldwide had contracted the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). Governments raced to curb the spread of COVID-19 by scaling up testing, quarantining those infected, and tracing their possible contacts. It had taken Singapore’s Government Technology Agency (GovTech) and Ministry of Health (MOH) all of eight weeks to develop the world’s first nationwide deployment of a Bluetooth-based contact tracing system, TraceTogether, and deploy it in an attempt to slow the spread of COVID-19. From late January to mid-March 2020, GovTech’s Jason Bay and his team raced to create a technology that would supplement the work of Singapore’s human contact tracers. Days after its launch, Singapore’s foreign minister announced plans to open source the technology. Now, in early April, TraceTogether was a beta for the world. Whether the system would really help in Singapore, and whether other countries should adopt it was still a wide-open question.
Keywords: COVID-19; contact tracing; Government Administration; Crisis Management; Health; Health Pandemics; Innovation and Invention; Innovation Leadership; Innovation Strategy; Technological Innovation; Social Issues; Technology; Mobile Technology; Software; Technology Adoption; Health Industry; Public Administration Industry; Singapore;

Citation:
Weiss, Mitchell B., and Sarah Mehta. "TraceTogether." Harvard Business School Case 820-111, June 2020. (Revised July 2020.) View Details
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Case | HBS Case Collection | June 2020
RBC: Transforming Transformation (A)
Ethan Bernstein, Francesca Gino and Aldo Sesia
In 2017, the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), a Canadian financial icon, mandated a swat team of “enablers of collaboration” (their job description) to support the personal and commercial bank in the enterprise-wide RBC Cultural Transformation initiative. Historically, personal and commercial banks (P&CB) maintained long relationships with their clients who tended to do most if not all of their banking with one bank. However, by 2017, industry-wide change was well underway as switching costs had become negligible if not non-existent. New entrants were disrupting the banking industry as digitization allowed upstarts to break through long-standing barriers to entry. RBC’s Cultural Transformation, intended to reposition the enterprise for the “new normal” in the financial industry, included the creation of this team of collaboration enablers (called Operations Transformation or OT) to drive efficiencies across operations within the current fulfillment operating model and importantly to envision and enable a new digital operating model where people only intervened in a transaction when there was an exception, i.e., a transaction that fell outside the technology’s capabilities. OT was tasked with enabling—through collaboration and without radical surgery—the day-to-day optimization of P&CB fulfillment activities and facilitating major change in the way work was done. At the time of the case, eighteen months in, the team was seeing mixed results, which deeply troubled its leadership. Questions abounded: Was it foolish to try to enable major change through collaboration without upending the traditional RBC organization with more radical approaches? Or was the OT group not structured correctly to enable it—and if not, what changes should be made? Was a different collaboration model needed? Internally, some questioned whether the group was optimally located within the organization (as part of the back office organization structure), since the back office was often viewed as more of a servant to the front office. Others wondered if OT’s internal structure was getting in the way of its purpose. The case examines three major transformation projects that OT is collaborating on with colleagues from Banking Operations and Risk Operations to understand what contributed to less than hoped for results. With this information OT leadership needs to think about changes, if any, moving forward from a structural, organizational, and capability perspective.
Keywords: Service Delivery; Technology; Transformation; Change Management; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Innovation and Management; Decision Making; Human Resources; Management Systems; Organizational Design; Organizational Structure; Groups and Teams; Management Teams; Banking Industry; Financial Services Industry; Canada;

Citation:
Bernstein, Ethan, Francesca Gino, and Aldo Sesia. "RBC: Transforming Transformation (A)." Harvard Business School Case 920-008, June 2020. View Details
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