Karim R. Lakhani

Timeline

1. 1993–2006

   Open source at MIT Sloan

   He graduates in electrical engineering and management from McMaster University in Canada in 1993 and earns an MIT master's in technology and policy in 1999. At MIT Sloan, he works with Eric von Hippel on how communities build open-source software and whether contests can organize crowds, and he co-edits Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software for MIT Press in 2005. He completes his PhD in management at MIT Sloan in 2006.

2. 2009–2017

   The NASA Tournament Lab

   A Topcoder contest he runs for NASA produces an algorithm that picks the contents of a space emergency medical kit, and in 2009 he leads the launch of the NASA Tournament Lab at Harvard's Institute for Quantitative Social Science. The lab designs competitions for NASA and other federal agencies, takes the name Crowd Innovation Lab in 2012, and becomes the starting point of the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard, established in 2017.

3. 2020

   A book on AI-centric firms

   With Marco Iansiti, he co-authors Competing in the Age of AI, published by Harvard Business Review Press in 2020. The book argues that rebuilding a firm around data, analytics and AI removes old limits on scale, scope and learning.

4. 2022

   Co-founding a Harvard AI institute

   He co-founds the Digital Data Design Institute at Harvard and serves as its founding chair. In 2022, the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard joins the institute to study AI, leadership and decision-making.

5. 2023

   The jagged technological frontier

   With Edward McFowland III, Fabrizio Dell'Acqua and researchers from Wharton, MIT Sloan, Warwick Business School and BCG, he studies 758 BCG consultants for the 2023 working paper "Navigating the Jagged Technological Frontier." On tasks inside AI's frontier, consultants using GPT-4 complete 12.2 percent more tasks, 25.1 percent faster; on tasks outside it, they are 19 percent less likely to reach correct solutions.

6. February 2025

   An AI course for every MBA

   In February 2025, he and his colleagues launch Data Science and AI for Leaders (DSAIL), an AI-native course required for all 935 MBA students at Harvard Business School. Students work with a tutor bot trained on the course materials and with Julius.ai, an AI data scientist that runs analyses from plain-language requests.

7. March 2025

   The cybernetic teammate study

   He co-authors "The Cybernetic Teammate," a Harvard Business School working paper from March 2025, with Fabrizio Dell'Acqua, Raffaella Sadun, Ethan Mollick and others. Studying 791 Procter & Gamble professionals who develop products, the team finds that AI can act as a teammate that delivers many of the benefits of human collaborators.

8. As of October 2026

   Hintze professor and institute chair

   Cloudflare adds him to its board of directors in March 2025. He is the Dorothy & Michael Hintze Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, where his work covers technology management, innovation, digital transformation and AI. He is also founding chair of the HBS AI Institute, the new name of the Digital Data Design Institute at Harvard.