Technology & Operations Management

Technology & Operations Management

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About the Unit

As the world of operations has changed, so have interests and priorities within the Unit. Historically, the TOM Unit focused on manufacturing and the development of physical products. Over the past several years, we have expanded our research, course development, and course offerings to encompass new issues in information technology, supply chains, and service industries.

The field of TOM is concerned with the design, management, and improvement of operating systems and processes. As we seek to understand the challenges confronting firms competing in today's demanding environment, the focus of our work has broadened to include the multiple activities comprising a firm's "operating core":

  • the multi-function, multi-firm system that includes basic research, design, engineering, product and process development and production of goods and services within individual operating units;
  • the networks of information and material flows that tie operating units together and the systems that support these networks;
  • the distribution and delivery of goods and services to customers.

Recent Publications

Disrupting Defense at Anduril Industries

By: Rory McDonald, Timothy Buehn, Aditi Ghai and James Heffelfinger
  • June 2022 |
  • Case |
  • Faculty Research
Related

The Welfare Effects of Peer Entry in the Accommodation Market: The Case of Airbnb and the Accommodation Industry

By: Chiara Farronato and Andrey Fradkin
  • June 2022 |
  • Article |
  • American Economic Review
We study the effects of enabling peer supply through Airbnb in the accommodation industry. We present a model of competition between flexible and dedicated sellers—peer hosts and hotels—who provide differentiated products. We estimate this model using data from major U.S. cities and quantify the welfare effects of Airbnb on travelers, hosts, and hotels. The welfare gains are concentrated in locations (New York) and times (New Year's Eve) when hotels are capacity constrained. This occurs because peer hosts are responsive to market conditions, expand supply as hotels fill up, and keep hotel prices down as a result.
Keywords: Peer To Peer; Airbnb; Digital Platforms; Market Entry and Exit; Competition; Accommodations Industry
Related

Worten Portugal: Becoming a Digital Marketplace

By: Antonio Moreno, Pedro Amorim and Tonia Labruyere
  • June 2022 |
  • Case |
  • Faculty Research
With Amazon's entry into Portugal, Miguel Mota Freitas, CEO of Portuguese electronics chain Worten, is reflecting on their strategy of building a competitive marketplace.
Keywords: Digital Transformation; Digital Strategy; Digital Platforms; Brands and Branding; E-commerce; Logistics; Service Delivery; Supply Chain; Competitive Strategy; Diversification; Consumer Products Industry; Electronics Industry; Retail Industry; Portugal; Spain
Related

Conservatism Gets Funded? A Field Experiment on the Role of Negative Information in Novel Project Evaluation

By: Jacqueline N. Lane, Misha Teplitskiy, Gary Gray, Hardeep Ranu, Michael Menietti, Eva C. Guinan and Karim R. Lakhani
  • June 2022 |
  • Article |
  • Management Science
The evaluation and selection of novel projects lies at the heart of scientific and technological innovation, and yet there are persistent concerns about bias, such as conservatism. This paper investigates the role that the format of evaluation, specifically information sharing among expert evaluators, plays in generating conservative decisions. We executed two field experiments in two separate grant-funding opportunities at a leading research university, mobilizing 369 evaluators from seven universities to evaluate 97 projects, resulting in 761 proposal-evaluation pairs and more than $250,000 in awards. We exogenously varied the relative valence (positive and negative) of others’ scores and measured how exposures to higher and lower scores affect the focal evaluator’s propensity to change their initial score. We found causal evidence of a negativity bias, where evaluators lower their scores by more points after seeing scores more critical than their own rather than raise them after seeing more favorable scores. Qualitative coding of the evaluators’ justifications for score changes reveals that exposures to lower scores were associated with greater attention to uncovering weaknesses, whereas exposures to neutral or higher scores were associated with increased emphasis on nonevaluation criteria, such as confidence in one’s judgment. The greater power of negative information suggests that information sharing among expert evaluators can lead to more conservative allocation decisions that favor protecting against failure rather than maximizing success.
Keywords: Project Evaluation; Innovation; Knowledge Frontier; Information Sharing; Negativity Bias; Projects; Innovation and Invention; Information; Knowledge Sharing
Related

AWS and Amazon SageMaker (C): The Commercialization of Machine Learning Services

By: Karim R. Lakhani, Shane Greenstein and Kerry Herman
  • May 2022 |
  • Supplement |
  • Faculty Research
Related

AWS and Amazon SageMaker (B): The Commercialization of Machine Learning Services

By: Karim R. Lakhani, Shane Greenstein and Kerry Herman
  • May 2022 |
  • Supplement |
  • Faculty Research
Related

AWS and Amazon SageMaker (A): The Commercialization of Machine Learning Services

By: Karim R. Lakhani, Shane Greenstein and Kerry Herman
  • May 2022 |
  • Case |
  • Faculty Research
Related

Are Experts Blinded by Feasibility?: Experimental Evidence from a NASA Robotics Challenge

By: Jacqueline N. Lane, Zoe Szajnfarber, Jason Crusan, Michael Menietti and Karim R. Lakhani
  • 2022 |
  • Working Paper |
  • Faculty Research
Resource allocation decisions play a dominant role in shaping a firm’s technological trajectory and competitive advantage. Recent work indicates that innovative firms and scientific institutions tend to exhibit an anti-novelty bias when evaluating new projects and ideas. In this paper, we focus on shedding light into this observed pattern by examining how evaluator expertise in the problem’s focal domain shapes the relationship between novelty and feasibility in evaluations of quality for technical solutions. To estimate relationships, we partnered with NASA and Freelancer.com, an online labor marketplace, to design an evaluation challenge, where we recruited 374 evaluators from inside and outside the technical domain to rate 101 solutions drawn from nine robotics challenges. This resulted in 3,869 evaluator-solution pairs, in which evaluators were randomly assigned to solutions to facilitate experimental comparisons. Our experimental findings, complemented with text analysis of the evaluators’ comments, indicate that domain experts exhibit a feasibility preference, focusing first on the feasibility of a solution as the primary indicator of its quality, while discounting riskier but more novel solutions. This results in a tradeoff in which highly feasible but less novel solutions are judged as being higher in quality, shedding light into why experts prefer more incremental ideas over more radical but untested ideas.
Keywords: Evaluations; Novelty; Feasibility; Field Experiment; Resource Allocation; Technological Innovation; Competitive Advantage; Decision Making
Related
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Contact Information

Technology & Operations Management Unit
Harvard Business School
Morgan Hall
Soldiers Field
Boston, MA 02163
tomunit@hbs.edu