IPN Spotlight: Karim R. Lakhani (Charles E. Wilson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School)
Karim R. Lakhani is the Charles E. Wilson Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. He is the founder and co-director of the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard, co-founder, and co-director of the Harvard Business School Digital Initiative and the co-chair of the Harvard Business Analytics Program. His research focuses on crowdsourcing, innovative problem solving and creativity. He also studies the digital transformation of companies through data and analytics. His award-winning research has been published in leading peer-reviewed academic journals and in practitioner publications like the Harvard Business Review and the Sloan Management Review.
Professor Lakhani is the Principal Investigator of the NASA Tournament Lab and advises the space agency on how external knowledge can be integrated within its organization. He is a member of the Board of Directors of Mozilla Corporation and advises several technology startups. He previously worked at General Electric in various sales, marketing and new product development roles and was a strategy consultant at the Boston Consulting Group.
What skills have helped you in your career?
I have been very fortunate to have access to great educational institutions (McMaster University & MIT) to build my skill base. Engineering education has enabled me to consider problems in a systematic form- how to break them down into smaller parts and solve them. Economics, sociology and policy training has allowed me to be analytical and to think in terms of causal relationships in systems. Extracurricular activities have assisted me in developing my social and leadership skills. My twitter tagline says that I am an “Expert Social Janitor” – this by far is my most valued skill.
What do you wish you had known or done differently throughout your career?
I can’t overemphasize the importance of mentors. Throughout my career, I have been blessed with mentors that have steered me in the right direction, asked tough questions, challenged my assumptions and pushed me to consider options that I had discarded. Even now I rely on a range of mentors for advice, support and thinking. However, you need to be a good mentee as well. Mentee’s even though they are seeking advice from a mentor need to be able to provide value to the mentor. Consider how can you help them specifically (don’t say where do you need help) and you need to follow through on the advice provided. Also, don’t ask someone to be your mentor. It’s in the relationship where you deliver value to someone else that they take an interest in you and eventually become your mentor.
What do you do for continuing education and improvement?
My job is to learn and improve upon current knowledge continuously. This entails becoming an expert in a specific domain and then to keep extending the frontier of knowledge. I do this through my research program that involves field experiments on innovation with my team of students, postdoctoral fellows, scientists and fellow collaborators. In my spare time, I read a lot of fiction and get ideas from diving into disciplines that are distant from my own field of expertise.
What is next for you in your career?
Professors are privileged to have an intellectual hunting license. I am genuinely interested in problem solving and innovation and how we can rely on a global talent pool to help address important challenges. My goal is to keep discovering new knowledge and to put it to good use by disseminating it to the broad public and training the next generation of leaders.
What advice would you offer to others?
Follow your curiosity. Many people suggest that to be successful you need to find your passion – but many of us do not know what we are passionate about. I would instead recommend that you follow your curiosity. What things interest you and you want to learn more about them? What tasks and activities do you want to pursue so that when it comes to spending the extra hour or day or week on them, you will choose to do them instead of something else. It’s by following your curiosity you will stumble upon your passion. MHI’s has advised the Jamat to excel in the Knowledge Society. To do so, Ismaili professionals need to become leaders in knowledge discovery, usage and collaborate with others in their professional domains. This is a generational opportunity for the Jamat and its professionals to lead the way.
Areas where you can help other Ismailis:
• Academia and PhD as a career option
• Technology and Innovation Management
• Digital Innovation and Transformation
Please provide the link to your LinkedIn profile:
Karim Lakhani
Please provide your preferred email address so interested professionals can network with you:
[email protected]
Region:
Northeast
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